


Caged

by Menirva



Series: Learning to Fly [3]
Category: Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Genre: Boys being BAMFs, Boys. Boy stop fighting., Dubious Consent, Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping, M/M, Sassy Barsad, Stockholm Syndrome, This is why we can't have nice things Bruce, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-23
Updated: 2012-10-15
Packaged: 2017-11-14 20:59:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 24
Words: 47,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/519447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Menirva/pseuds/Menirva
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The cavalry is finally here.</p><p>Unfortunately John Blake wants nothing to do with them and no one sent them the memo.</p><p>Sequel to 'Clipped' (Written from a kinkmeme prompt, details inside)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written as a sequel to clipped and for TDKR kinkmeme from the following prompt-
> 
> "Could I possibly get a fic where Bane and Blake (and Barsad, if anon wishes) are in an established relationship and Batman comes and 'saves the day' by rescuing him. Essentially kidnapping him from his lovers/original kidnappers. They (being Batman/Bruce Wayne and Gordon) spend many months while Bane's in jail trying to free Blake of the brainwashing they think he's suffering from. The entire time he's kept in a house with 24/7 surveillance and police guarding him."

There it was, blazing bright in the sky. The silhouette of his former mentor lit up for any who braved Gotham in the night to see. He had been waiting for it, expecting it as it had been one of Bruce Wayne’s final acts to repair the broken signal, but he still hadn’t decided what he would do when it came. His actions were gaining the public’s attention; they had been for the past month or so.

Just the other morning, he’d stumbled into their apartment at the very crack of dawn, side aching from where he’d been rammed by a mobster’s car; Porsche, red, the guy looked like he was about to cry when he drove it into him, Blake. And he still thought of himself as Blake, no matter that no one he knew used the name anymore but him. He had done the mobster the common courtesy of trying not to scratch the paint too much when he rolled over the hood. Once home, he collapsed carefully onto their bed with a groan, rubbing his cheek where he’d been smacked with a crowbar, of course on the one area where he wasn’t covered in armor.

Bane left the kitchen table where he had been sitting and lightly tossed a newspaper onto Blake’s back. Blake would much rather have had a little bit of sympathy over newsprint from him or Barsad, who was nowhere to be seen at the moment, but he made a face and picked up the paper to read.

_GOTHAM CITY HAS A NEW VIGILANTE?_

was plastered across the front page, accompanied by a rather blurry photo of his back, obviously taken from a cell phone and blown up to fit the page. He wondered if it had been taken by one of the muggers he had beaten down a couple of days before. In the back of his mind, he remembered having heard some sort of shutter snap sound while he’d been shoving one of them against a brick wall.

He might have smiled if his face didn’t hurt so much at the moment. Instead, he settled back and continued to read when he felt the weighted dip of the bed beside him as Bane sat and began to work off his heavy armor with care.

“You are becoming known, my little bird.”

Blake sighed contently as his thighs were bared and Bane ran his fingers down them, digging into the tight calves to work out the sore tension there. Wearing full body armor, even though it was great protection, left him almost as tired and sore as the fighting did.

“I know. Last night, someone saw me coming and I could tell that they kn—” He paused and stared at the page. “NIGHT WING? That’s what they’re calling me?”

Bane chuckled, “It will never be your true name, Robin; does the name the press gives you truly matter?”

“Well, no, but it just doesn’t really make sense,” Blake replied, certainly not pouting slightly. “I mean, Batman, that made more sense. He was a man and a bat… what am I? Night with wings?”

“I think it suits you.”

Blake turned his head towards the door as Barsad walked in, carrying three small blinking devices, each splattered with blood. Blake glanced away as the other man walked to the sink to clean them. It was a part of the job he didn’t like to think about, even though he knew how necessary it was. He’d thought of it himself after all. It was never easy, though, to choose who was unredeemable and needed to be taken out of the world. Blake knew, at least, that when he tagged someone, Barsad—or Bane, Blake found they often alternated the task—would make it quick, clean, cutting the cancer away from Gotham like a surgeon. That didn’t mean Blake liked to see the blood that was washed away from those tracking devices in the morning, the only remnants anyone would ever see of a life wasted by crime.  Blake didn’t watch, didn’t ask where the bodies went; he honestly didn’t want to know. He trusted them to take care of the job and the details that came with it.

“You would think that, both of you would, always treating me like I actually am a bird.” Blake had hissed slightly in pain when his chest plate was removed. Bane’s eyes narrowed at the mass of black and blue that mottled his side. “Armor can only do so much when I’m hit by a car.”

“Perhaps you should avoid cars.” Bane ran a surprisingly gentle finger across the edge of the bruise.

“Good idea.” He had agreed and sighed contently, closing his eyes as Bane's hands continued to explore his body. His fingers stroked over every mark, rubbing away the soreness and replacing it with desire until Blake's body was thrumming with it and his cheeks were getting flushed. He finally reached up impatiently to clasp a hand to the thick muscles across the back of Bane's neck, drawing him down so his mask pressed lightly to his forehead.

"C'mon," He whispered softly. "I'm not too tired."

Bane chuckled lightly in approval and they had proceeded to spend a lazy morning in bed until Blake was pretty sure he fell asleep in the middle of what they were doing. He kind of hoped Barsad helped finish Bane off at least.

Now he was looking up into the spotlight, his spotlight—bat logo be damned, it was his now—unsure if he should be answering that call. He was willing to put money on it that it was Gordon trying to contact him, but he didn’t know what his former boss could want. He hadn’t seen him since Bruce Wayne’s funeral, and he didn’t know if he had ever tried to check in on him; he hadn’t exactly been back to his old apartment since he had been taken in by Bane. When they had moved from the cave to the new apartment, he’d considered going back to rummage through his old things, but he’d realized that anything there was just a reminder of his old life and better off forgotten.

The commissioner had worked with Batman, though, they had been allies. Blake wasn’t without powerful allies already, but it couldn’t hurt to have Gordon on his side, as well. The disgust he’d felt for him before, when he’d found out that he’d used Harvey Dent as a false idol, had been all but forgotten. He knew what it was like to want to keep your hands clean, now. Bane would most likely be displeased with the idea of Blake working with the police, but Blake knew that Barsad would help Blake reason with him that this would change nothing in the way they had been working. Decision reached, he made his way to the station.

_______________

  
Barsad sighed softly as he watched the windowsill. Where was their little Robin? It was very much unlike him to not be home by dawn. Bane was pacing the floors, even his footsteps made no sound as he moved. He had come back that morning, two devices in hand, before Robin, which was unusual enough, disposing of bodies usually meant they came in later. Now an hour had passed since then, and there was still no sign that he was about to drop through the window at any moment. Barsad had checked the tracking devices he knew would still be on their little one’s person, but none of them had been activated so they were left with no clues.

Finally he broke the silence. “Could he have taken off, brother?”

It had only happened once, the very first week that they had left the cave and moved into their current dwelling. It had been the same day they’d worked out the details on the tracking devices for their little bird to use on those that would be harvested from the earth. Their Robin had gone out for air and not come back until the next day. They had both wanted to pursue him immediately, but had decided to first give him the chance to make the right decision on his own. He had slipped back in midday, looking worn and shamefaced.

“I’m sorry,” was all he had said as they gathered him up and took him to bed. It hadn’t been spoken of since.

Even before Bane shook his head, Barsad knew that this was different. Their Robin was strong in his purpose now, he wouldn’t just leave. That left only unsavory options. The ideas squirmed around in his belly unpleasantly. Their Robin was strong, though, a warrior not easily felled. If something was amiss they would find him and give him aid.

He stood and slid his coat on, tucking his gun into a concealed fold. Bane did not bother with such a thing, only donning a motorcycle helmet, something that usually meant people gave him only a curious passing glance as he walked down the street. They left to search.

_______________

  
The light of day was not their ally. Even with the helmet’s tinted glass, it was too bright in Bane’s eyes. The double layer of mask and helmet cut off his senses in an infuriating matter, making him feel something akin to claustrophobia when he went more than several hours wearing the combination. It had been four since his count, four hours of scouring the more hostile parts of the city, looking for some sign of their missing Robin.

Bane had had a slight idea of where he had been already. The two men he had disposed of that day had been from a gang that had been forming in old town; there were hints that their Robin had been fighting there earlier, but then the trail went cold even with their advanced tracking skills. After all, they were the ones who had taught their little one to disappear, a lesson that he had perhaps learned too well for their own good in the moment.

It sat very poorly indeed with him that he was uncertain where to go next. He was not without other contacts in the city, carefully placed from within the league to gather what information or deeds were needed, but he was unsure what to tell them. Their little one was alive, of that he had not a doubt, but he seemed to have vanished.

Barsad, who had gone into a café to question the owners discretely, was hurrying back to him now, his lips pressed into a tight line. He gestured and they walked into the nearby alley.

“There was talk of last night, I checked the papers.” Without delay he held the paper up close so that Bane could see it even through the glass of his helmet.

_RETURN OF BATMAN?_

Under it blazed the symbol of Mr. Wayne’s masked creation, bright in the sky. The words under the image were too small to read, but they were unimportant. This could certainly not be a coincidence. Surely their little bird had made the unfortunate error of deciding to follow the summons of the beacon of light. It was almost calming; this meant their Robin was unharmed. Hypocritical and foolish as the commissioner was, Bane knew their little one would remain physically unharmed. Now it was merely a matter of finding and re-obtaining him.


	2. Chapter 2

_______________

  
Blake’s head felt muzzy when he woke up. It reminded him of the time when he’d spent a little too much time mouthing at Bane’s mask and the gasses from it had made him dizzy enough to pass out in his arms. It had been kind of funny in retrospect. He wasn’t in Bane’s arms right now, though. He was on a bed with no warmth of other bodies surrounding him, which was odd because he never slept alone anymore. It didn’t feel quite like his bed, either, it was too soft, their bed was just a bit more firm, something good for curling up together on. The curious circumstances that kept piling up were enough to make him pop an eye open to take in his surroundings.

Ugly wallpaper. Seriously ugly wallpaper.

He was in a mostly empty room, nothing beyond the bed, a dresser, and a small bedside table. No windows, even. On top of the table was a notepad; something was written onto it that Blake couldn’t quite see from his angle on the bed.

Where was he? He tried to trace back his steps, though the last thing he could remember was dusk. He’d finished dressing for the night and had been pulled into an embrace by Bane, one that he always felt even through every layer of armor he wore, and then a light kiss to Barsad before he had gone out alone. So, how was he here?

Movement caught the corner of his eye and he glanced up. A camera, attached to the ceiling. That just added to his confusion. A flash of memory suddenly came to him.

The Bat Signal.

He focused on the thought, replaying it in his mind until the rest of the details began to fit hazily into place.

Gordon had been there like he had thought. Blake hadn’t been worried about being recognized; he’d run into a couple of officers on the street without his costume, men whom he’d drank with, worked with, and they hadn’t even given him a second glance. It was like he was a new person, the costume only added to it. Gordon had leaned nonchalantly against the signal, and Blake let his feet kick up a little gravel on the roof to make his presence known. Gordon didn’t jump, but he did turn towards him and nodded in greeting.

“So, you’re the new blood, then?” he’d asked casually.

Blake nodded. He’d already decided that he was going to keep talking to a minimum. Gordon had spent a lot of time with him; this was a risk, but it could pay off.

“Word on the street is that you’ve been cleaning them up pretty well. Well enough that sometimes people aren’t making it home at night.”

“I haven’t killed anyone, if that’s what you’re implying,” he’d shot back hotly, keeping his voice low and gruff like he’d heard Bruce do. “Someone has to take care of the streets, though. Gotham needs someone who can do the work you can’t.”

Gordon had stared at him. His face had been almost sad, Blake couldn’t understand it.

“Oh, son…”

Too late he could sense something behind him. Someone. Someone as soundless as he had been trained to be. He felt a sharp prick at his neck. The injection had made him feel knocked out in seconds, like he had been tossed into the ocean. Still he had tried to turn around, to see who had managed to sneak up on him.

A dead man. Bruce Wayne. Back from the dead and standing over his sprawled out form with Gordon, both had looked at him with concern as he had lost consciousness.

He sat up and rubbed his neck before he picked up the notepad to read it.

_We need to talk._

No shit. Blake snorted and stood, disconcerted that he was now dressed in soft pajama pants, his armor and weaponry nowhere to be seen. He padded over and tried the door, locked. He wasn’t going to panic. This was definitely unusual and he was pretty sure he could break it open with a little pressure. He had been pretty certain his kidnapping days were behind him, but he was a lot smarter now and he could get through this before Bane showed up and tore off the heads of whoever stood in his path. Orders or not, he knew Bane would argue that he had been in harm’s way, and the ‘no killing unless tagged’ rule was definitely discarded in those cases. Barsad would shrug and probably shoot a couple himself. That would be really unreasonable if all that had happened so far was that he’d been tucked carefully into bed in a pair of flannel jammies.

He knocked loudly on the door. He could faintly hear the sound of voices after that. He pounded louder after a moment.

“Hey, uh, hello! I’d like out now? Or at least could I get a different room? I’m going blind from the wallpaper in this one!”

“Step back from the door, son,” the calm voice was slightly muffled from the door between them, but it was definitely Gordon’s.

Blake blinked then stood there for a moment, considering the options before he stepped back a few paces, waiting.

“A little more.”

He blinked again in confusion then remembered the camera, rolling his eyes before he walked over to sit on the bed. “This good?”

The door opened and Gordon stepped in a moment later, looking clean pressed and apologetic. It closed right behind him with the soft click of a tumbler locking it into place. “It’s just a precaution, John, I’m sorry.”

“Robin,” Blake corrected. He was only Blake to himself, Robin to the rest of the world. John didn’t even exist anymore, as far as he was concerned.

“That’s your first name, isn’t it? I saw it in your records.”

“Yeah. Look, what is all of this about?” He wasn’t going to let himself get caught up in some weird small talk. Gordon knew who he was, clearly. He didn’t know what was going on, but he’d had enough and wanted to cut through the bullshit.

“You know what this is about, son,” Gordon spoke the words gently, like he was trying to take care of a skittish animal, and it was now ‘son’ again, not ‘Robin,’ Blake noted.

“I’m afraid I don’t, old man. Am I under arrest?”

“What? No, of course not, Jesus, John… Robin,” Gordon clearly reluctantly corrected after Blake narrowed his eyes.

“Then let me get out of here. Nice as these pajamas are, I’m pretty sure I liked my old outfit better.”

Gordon shook his head and instead held up a handful of tracers from behind his back. “Should we talk about these?”

Blake glanced at them and shrugged, trying to keep an air of indifference going on even when he was starting to feel unnerved. “Don’t see what there is to talk about.”

“How about what these are for, son?”  When Blake merely shrugged again, he continued, “We found traces of DNA on them, John, a lot of different traces. When I had them run through the criminal database, I came up with a lot of hits from a lot of bad guys who have suddenly disappeared.”

Blake clenched his jaw tightly at that; it was getting a whole lot harder to stay calm. “I said I didn’t fucking kill anyone.”

“I didn’t say you did, now did I?” Gordon tried to placate him. “But these were on you, and that’s a pretty big coincidence, and you know how I feel about those.”

“If I’m not under arrest, I want out of here, and I don’t think I am because last I checked our cells didn’t look anything like this.”

“John—”

“Robin.”

“Son,” Gordon sighed and slipped the tracers into his pocket. “We know what happened to you… It’s not your fault.”

Blake stared in confusion when he continued, “You’re going through a lot of feelings and emotions right now, you probably feel safe with him, like you owe it to him to stay with him. That’s not true, though. No matter what he did to you, you’re still John Blake and you’re still a fine young man.”

“Who?” he ventured cautiously. He couldn’t possibly really know, could he? They’d been careful.

“You know who; Bane. You’re safe from him, now.”

Blake felt like the world was pressing down on him with the words. His head was swimming. He was safe with Bane, with Barsad, and they were going to come get him. Gordon knew, though, he knew Bane was back and apparently thought for some reason that Blake needed to be rescued from him.

“He’ll find me,” he argued, gripping tightly at the blanket beneath his hands.

“No, no, don’t worry, son, you’re safe here,” Gordon reassured. Blake almost felt sorry for him. He thought he was doing the right thing. He always thought he was doing the right thing when he was doing something terrible.

The door clicked open and both men looked up. Blake startled. So, his eyes hadn’t failed him; Bruce Wayne was standing there looking tanner, older, if possible even grimmer, no, probably not possible.

“He’ll find me,” Blake repeated. “If you don’t let me go, he’ll find me and it will be bad for you,” he warned, not threatened. He didn’t want Gordon hurt, or Bruce dead… again.

Bruce shook his head and looked at him, with fucking pity that made Blake consider for a moment if he really wanted him alive, after all. It made him almost itch to get his hand on one of those tracers and tag the bastard for PITYING him when he was now, frankly, so much greater than the other man had ever been. Bruce had been merely indoctrinated into the shadows. Blake ruled them. If Bruce had not left the league, Blake would command him.

“We’re counting on it, John.” Bruce held up one of the tracers that Blake had just moments ago longed for and turned it on.

Realization dawned on Blake.

He was fucking bait. They were prepared and thought they had something in place, something big enough to take down Bane.

He sprang up from the bed and leapt for the tracer. He crashed into Bruce; clearly the man hadn’t been expecting him to be able to move so fast. Blake didn’t have time to be smug, though. He ripped the device from his hands and tore it to pieces.   
  
“Fuck you, Bruce!” he snarled. “I’m not letting you use me to hurt him.”

Shock had prevented Bruce from moving at first, but now they wrestled each other on the floor. It was clear Bruce was pulling his punches, keeping his holds looser to avoid hurting him. Blake wanted to laugh even when he bit down hard onto his arm to distract him and deliver a blow to his kidney which sounded like it had punched the wind out of him.

He could beat Barsad in a fight now fairly often, he could make Bane winded and landed blows on him with increasing accuracy. Bruce was going to have to actually try to hurt him if he had any hope of ever taking him down.

“Stop it, both of you!” Gordon hollered. Blake heard the click of a gun being cocked in warning and swung back from Bruce, scrambling away when he saw two uniformed officers holding rifles at the doorway. He squinted, correction, not rifles, tranquilizer guns.

Gordon scrubbed his hand through his hair in vexation. “You think this is helping him? He doesn’t need to see that, B—” he stopped and glanced at the officers. “—Mr. Smith.” It was an obvious thing, but the officers made no indication they noticed.

“So it’s like that?” Blake spat out, rubbing the sore spot on his side that Bruce had aggravated.

“Son, I’m sorry. This is to help you.” He waved the officers out of the room.

“I don’t need your help!”

Bruce pushed himself up to stand carefully, “You’ve been brainwashed, John. I know what it was like; I was drawn into the League of Shadows, too. It makes you feel like you belong; it makes you feel strong when you used to feel weak. This isn’t you, though.”

“You don’t know anything about me.”

“I know we’re the same. I wouldn’t have left you my legacy if I didn’t believe that, John.”

He shook his head. Bruce fucking Wayne, he couldn’t believe he’d ever looked up to the guy.


	3. Chapter 3

_______________

  
The tracer winked on in Bane’s hand, and he looked down at it in surprise. It was certainly not what he had been expecting. He thumbed over the screen carefully, looking at the coordinates. It was a location in the city he was not particularly familiar with, a neighborhood. Almost as soon as it had flashed on the screen, it flickered back out. Very interesting, indeed. Their clever little bird had perhaps found a way to send out a flare to them.

Barsad was already as his side the moment he’d been seen looking at the screen. “Will we gather him, now?”

Bane shook his head, “We will wait until nightfall, when the sky is on our side.”

He instead researched the location that had been given. It was indeed a small neighborhood, most of it still partially under construction and therefore very empty. Bane was not sure what exactly the purpose of taking their Robin there could be, but that did not matter. All that mattered was bringing him home.

He was sorely tempted to let him escape on his own. He was confident that with some time their little bird would be able to find his own way out and feel quite proud of himself for doing so. The whole event was very unsettling for Bane, however, and he decided that he did not wish to wait it out. They busied themselves with menial tasks in silence. It was not unusual for them to pass a day without speaking, so in tune were they with one another that words were not needed, but their little Robin often livened up the air between them and drew conversation from them both. The quiet was more noticeable now, more oppressive. They slept a brief apprehensive sleep to keep up their energy before the sun set into the sky.

A gated community, how upper-class; Bane still did not understand the point in keeping their Robin here, but it did not matter. There was little use in dwelling on it when they would all be gone from it soon enough. He circled around the length of the gated ground on their motorbike, Barsad loosely holding onto his sides from behind, searching for a suitable place to enter. The fence itself was climbable, but doing so would leave them exposed and vulnerable if they did not know who was watching.

Through the bars of the gate, a slight movement caught his eye. He silenced the engine and watched closely as he witnessed a guard shift change unfolding before his eyes. Neither man spoke to the other as one stepped up onto the tidy looking front porch of one of the many cookie cutter houses behind the gates and had a seat, settling a rifle onto his lap; the other disappeared into the house. Now they knew where exactly the eyes of the guard would be facing.

He signaled to Barsad and together they dismounted. It was not a difficult thing to climb the fence for either of them. It was completed soundlessly from a point in the gate that could not be seen from the porch. When their feet touched the grass they approached the house. Bane did not have a fully formulated plan yet, something he tried to avoid in such situations, but opportunity was presenting itself and he could admit that at times their Robin led him to make hasty decisions.

He stalked towards the house, Barsad flanking his left.

The explosion threw them both into the air.

_______________

  
Barsad threw his hands to his face to protect it as he was thrown to the ground. He could feel fluid leaking from his ears as the drums were ruptured from the blast. The fire licked at his body but he was able to roll away from the flames and smothered them with his hands so he could search for his brother. A trap, an ambush; their enemies were more clever and more willing to use violent forces than they had realized. Barsad would have felt begrudgingly impressed, if he had the time. The police had gotten smarter this time around.

His brother was on his knees, head shaking like an animal trying to get its bearings. Barsad’s brows furrowed with worry. If he had lived, then Bane was certainly ok, but the most delicate part of Bane was not his body. He crawled over quickly and pressed his hand to the mask, cursing when he felt how the tubes hissed out chemicals at an alarming rate. He was being medicated far too rapidly, the sudden influx would make him sick, could cause an overdose. Worse yet the catriges would empty soon, and his brother would be without medication. He did not need to check his pockets, he could feel the broken glass from the refill cartridges pressing into his legs.

His ears were ringing; he could hear nothing above the din of it. He briefly wondered if he would be rendered permanently deaf, but now was not the time to worry about such things. They needed to leave, to regroup, and come back wiser. He stood, wobbling to his feet and trying to straighten his brother to stand. Movement beyond the flames on the ground caught his eye.

They were surrounded. He had not heard them, he could still not hear them though their mouths were opened, shouting orders, not that he would obey them anyway.

_______________

  
Blake’s head whirled around the room in alarm when he heard the not so far off sound of an explosion. His mind immediately went back to the first days of occupation, when bombs had been going off everywhere around him as he raced through the streets. Gordon’s hand came up to squeeze his arm.

“It’s alright, son.” He took off the walkie clipped to his belt and spoke into it. “What’s going on out there, boys?”

Bruce was already pulling something from his pocket, looking at a screen. “They’ve got them.”

“Them?” Gordon asked.

“His second in command,” Bruce confirmed, not sharing the same surprise Gordon did.

Blake let out a choked gasp and ran over to look at the small display. His stomach roiled and his heart clenched up tight with anxiety when he saw the smoke, the group of armed men surrounding his protector, his disciple, his brothers. They had come for him anyway, and now they were captured because of him, and Blake knew they weren’t going to go to a nice little room like he had.

“Please, please don’t kill them,” he begged softly, grabbing for the screen. Begging was beneath him, they always told him that, he was a god and a god never begged but a god also couldn’t let his followers just perish. In his distress, Bruce was more easily able to evade him, and looked up in surprise.

“John, no one’s going to kill anyone… You know that’s not how we work.”

Blake shook his head. He didn’t understand anything that was going on right now, everything inside of him hurt.

“They’re getting sent away, son, where they can’t hurt anybody anymore,” Gordon tried to soothe him.

“You don’t understand,” he tried desperately. “I NEED them. Let them go, just let them go.”

“It will be ok, son, things look hard now, I know, but it’s going to look up,” Gordon promised.

Blake could hear muted sounds coming from the display still, orders to stand down, orders not being followed. He could see Bruce’s jaw tense as he watched, turned the screen away so Blake couldn’t see it any longer.

“What’s happening!” Blake demanded.

“It’s nothing, it just, something must had malfunctioned with—”

“With his mask? Let me fucking see!” He reached again and managed to rip the small screen from Bruce’s hands, running to the corner of the room and crouching down defensively so he could watch. He almost wished he hadn’t.

The small screen was crisp, nothing but top of the line for Bruce Wayne, clearly. Blake could see Barsad flat on the ground, his eyes closed as two men stood over him, guns trained onto his body. Blake could see red dripping from one of his ears. Had he been shot? How badly was he hurt? His breathing quickened.

Bane… Blake’s gripped the screen so hard it nearly snapped in two. Bane, his protector… a pile of men were sprawled out in a circle around him, they seemed alive, if badly injured, but that was only because their injuries not were caused from a serious attack on their person. Bane was too busy clawing at the mask, desperately trying to repair it as they swarmed him, lashing out every so often to bat them away. The feathered tips of tranquilizer darts dotted up his arms and it was clear they were having little effect at first, but now Blake watched as his protector’s movements became more sluggish, how he could not knock men away with the same ferocity.  

They closed in on them, the combination of drugs and the malfunctioning of the mask were undoing him. He dropped his arms like they were made of lead. Even on the tiny screen, he could see something in Bane’s eyes he had never seen before, weakness, defeat. He dropped down onto the ground beside Barsad, through the tiny speaker Bane could hear the wheezing gasps that sounded unlike what usually came from the mask. It sounded like he was suffocating.

He was about to shout uselessly at the screen for someone to do something, but another officer was prodding Bane with her gun, and then kneeling down. Blake gasped when he saw her hands clasp tentatively as the straps of the mask, working them open. He was transfixed. He had never seen Bane without it, he knew he could if he asked when Barsad changed out the medication or when he ate, but he had never wanted to. It had always seemed like the most private of things, something that was Bane’s alone to share, and now it was here about to be opened up like a wound and showed off to a group of those undeserving of it.

He didn’t want to watch, it felt wrong, but it would have felt worse to know that Bane was going through this alone, that he hadn’t been there at least in spirit.

It was peeled off of him, like a scab, and underneath was the barest truth Bane had to offer. Scars everywhere, thin silver lines that ran in a cobwebbed pattern over his lips. There were nicks there, places where flesh had torn and not healed in the right places so that they were uneven and warped. His nose was flattened, like it had been bashed in and never allowed to heal right, it probably hadn’t. His cheeks looked as though someone had ripped into them with their teeth, bitten huge chunks from the flesh so that now they were filled with scarred-over holes. Every exposed inch was a testament to a life of pain, lived gladly in exchange for the freedom of another. In it, he was beautiful. Blake felt his eyes grow wet and he threw the display against the wall, hearing it crack and break.

He could feel Gordon kneeling down beside him, part of him thought that the guy was getting up there in age and kneeling like that had to hurt. He felt something cloth being draped over his shoulders, a blanket, and Gordon’s arm followed it, wrapping around him securely.  
  
“It’s alright, son, let it out,” he said softly.

It wasn’t alright, nothing was alright, but he pushed his face into Gordon’s shoulder and cried anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Uhm... this was all the fic prompters fault, not mine! *heads for the hills*


	4. Chapter 4

He wasn’t sure how he’d fallen asleep, but when he woke up next he was still pressed in Gordon’s side; the older man had fallen into a light doze with him, half leaning into Blake in a way that, coupled with sleeping sitting up on the floor, was going to be hell on his back later.

He heard someone clear their throat softly and looked up to see Bruce sitting on the bed.

“What do you want?” Blake asked hoarsely. His face felt puffy and sore when he pulled it back from Gordon and gave it a careful rub.

“I’m sorry, John. None of this should have happened.” Bruce gave him a solemn look. He was very good at those.

“No, it shouldn’t have,” Blake agreed, but he had the feeling they were each thinking of different things.

“I would have saved you,” Bruce continued, sounding pained, “I didn’t know. I thought you were dead, John.”

Blake snorted. “I could say the same about you. Thanks, by the way, for sticking me with Batman while you went off and what, retired?”

“I thought you could handle it.”

“Ouch,” Blake winced even though it shouldn’t have hurt like it did; Bruce wasn’t his mentor anymore.

“No, I didn’t mean—“ Bruce stopped to recollected himself.

He heard Gordon groan lightly beside him and move slowly into a better sitting position. “Maybe you should start at the beginning and stop confusing the boy, huh?”

“You’re right,” Bruce agreed. “I was tracking you.”

“Tracking me.” Blake stared at him.

“When the people around you that you care about start dropping like flies you take… measures.”

“He put tracking devices in our necks while we were sleeping,” Gordon finished for him flatly.

“That… is the creepiest fucking thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” Blake’s hand shot up to feel around the back of his neck.

“It’s not there anymore, or if it is, it’s broken. That’s why I thought you were dead, John. I needed to leave Gotham, but I couldn’t just hand everything over without checking in, so I tracked you, then Gordon sent me a report that Bane had been spotted.”

"He'd been spotted? How the hell did that get left out of the papers?"

“A lot of bribery and threats." Gordon sighed. "We did what we could to keep it out until it was a sure thing. The last thing we wanted was full scale panic over a rumor."

“Wait, you knew he was alive this entire time? Did everyone know and just decide to leave me in the dark to fuck around in a bat suit?”

“I didn’t know until after the funeral, son, and I certainly didn’t know you were ‘fucking around in a bat suit’.” Gordon stood stiffly, carefully stretching his back out with a wince. “I would have tried to talk you out of it.”

“When Bane had been spotted, Gordon contacted me, kept me informed of each location he was spotted in. I was planning to come back, to at least warn you… then your tracker blinked out. That same day Gordon sent me a report that Bane had been spotted in the same area as your last known location.”

Blake nodded in understanding. “And you thought he killed me.”

“Because he thought you were me, the suit—“

“Bane’s not an idiot, even in the suit I looked nothing like you,” Blake interrupted. “He didn’t kill me, obviously, he just… subdued me.” Beat the crap out of, was more like it, hard enough to break up some sort of mini electronic device embedded in him. But admitting that made him sound like some sort of Stockholm victim.

From the tight-lipped looks he was getting from both men, he realized he really shouldn’t have bothered to make the effort.

“Bane disappeared after that. Bruce thought that because he’d thought he had gotten his revenge, he left.”

“Oh great, so I was like a sacrificial lamb. You thought Bane got what he wanted, so you were just going to let it go that he supposedly killed me.”

“John, no, nothing like that.” Bruce looked guilty at the thought. “There was just no trace of him; I looked.”

“We all looked for you, son, held a funeral for you, too,” Gordon added softly. “Police funeral, no one on the force wanted it any other way.”

Blake swallowed a little at that. It was rather touching. “Good thing for me I was in the last place you would have thought to look.”

Bruce shook his head at that. “It never occurred to me. It wasn’t until now, when you started making the news… when I saw your armor and that you were using the Bat-pod…” his voice trailed off and he looked distant for a moment before he refocused on Blake, eyes apologetic. “I didn’t know what to think… so I contacted Lucius, had him break into the recording footage of the cave for the past few months and feed it to me.”

Blake froze at that. Bruce had seen them, had seen everything, then; the good, the bad, fuck, the fucking. He felt the tips of his ears go red in mortification. It didn’t help his case any, either. He knew how those early days looked, when he’d been broken down and spent his time sprawled out on the floor, Bane looking over him. To anyone not going through the situation themselves, Blake had to look crazy.

“That.... was private,” he finally said quietly through clenched teeth, not looking at either man. Who knew, maybe Bruce had felt the need to share the footage with Gordon and, God, that idea was beyond humiliating.

“I know, John, I’m sorry. I needed to know what happened, though, so we could help you.”

“You can help me by letting me go!”

“I'm afraid we can’t do that.” Gordon kept his voice calm. “You’ve been through a lot, and you need some help getting back on your feet again.”

“I’ve been standing just fine without you for a long time,” Blake snapped. “I had them, and now you’re taking them away from me.”

“They’re killers, son. They hurt you, they’ve hurt a lot of people; putting them behind bars is what we do.”

“And what about me? This is kidnapping right here, isn’t it? You have no legal right to keep me here.”

“You are currently suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, John, you are a danger to yourself.”

“So fucking commit me,” he spat out. “Let me prove to a doctor how fucking sane I am. Hey, we’ll both check in, see who gets to check out first.”

“You’re also in protective custody.” Gordon interrupted. “We’ve got guys around the clock here watching you. We want you to be safe.”

“I WAS safe, and how are you swinging that kind of manpower just to keep me locked up?”

Gordon shook his head. “Son, you don’t get it, do you? Most of the people out there are volunteering. You saved almost every life out there when you set them free. Every single one of them would take a bullet for you. The least they figure they can do is work some extra hours without pay to keep you safe.”

Well, that was… humbling. Blake felt a little bad, knowing that everyone there really was just trying to help. It made it a lot harder to hate them for it.

“They’ll get out, you know,” he argued instead. “They’ll get out, and they’ll find me. That’s what I WANT. They’re MINE.” He tried to keep the possessive tone out of his voice, but saw how Bruce’s eyes were widening slightly in surprise.

“John, they’re not going to get out, and you’re going to get better. You just need some time apart, it’ll help,” Bruce assured him.

“So how long are you going to keep me here if I don’t ever ‘get better’?”

“You’ll be just fine, don’t worry about that.” Gordon assured him.

Bruce stood. “It’s a lot to take in; you probably want to spend some time alone.”

Blake stared. Bruce Wayne was an idiot with horrible people skills. Even Gordon was giving him a bit of a disbelieving look.

“Last thing he wants is to be left alone in here, Bruce. Let’s play some cards son, ok?”

Blake thought back to occupation days when him and Gordon had been stuck with hours of fuck-all to do. Gordon had taught him every card game he knew, which turned out to be quite a lot, and he had one hell of a poker face. They’d even managed to make each other smile a bit during the bad times, betting ridiculous things, the last pair of clean socks, two extra minutes of shower time, in one inspired moment a wad of chewed gum.

He nodded quietly. He needed time to regroup. If Bane and Barsad couldn’t get to him, he would find a way to escape on his own and rescue their asses. But to do that he would need information, something that would take time to gather. He held back a sigh. It looked like he was going to have plenty of that. It felt strangely like old times when he walked over to sit on the bed by Gordon as the man pulled an old faded deck from his pocket and started to shuffle.

Bruce sat uncomfortably on the bed, looking unsure if he should stay or go. Gordon finally looked over at him and dealt him a hand. “In or not, Bruce?”

They played in almost absolute silence, nothing more than the soft sound of cards being drawn from the pile. Blake hated it, but he hated the idea of talking about what was going on even more. He grit his teeth and played while he tried not to wonder where Bane and Barsad where, how much pain they were in, if they were being separated from each other, and if they were going to give Bane back his mask at all. He could survive without the mask, Blake told himself; he would endure. They would all make it through this. He just needed to make sure everyone involved made it out alive.

_______________

  
Pain. It always came down to pain, in the end. Bane had never quite been able to escape the yoke of pain he had taken on in servitude of a greater good. At times, it was almost soothing, a reminder that he was part of something greater. Not this, though, when even the slightest rush of air over his raw face was a blistering heat that scorched it, that ripped at every nick and tear. He was exposed, he could not serve, he could think of nothing beyond the pain of his face, of his entire body as it began to seize up in withdrawal from the medication he needed; of his soul, from failing his little bird. It had been unpleasant to be asphyxiating from the one thing that also kept him whole and sane. Now, however, he felt lost and would gladly accept his mask back even if he choked from it.

He was being transported somewhere. The ground beneath his feet vibrated from a vehicle of some sort. He had been there for a countless measure of time, for time had become nothing to him, just a meaningless idea that pain could not allow him to fathom. Others were there, and then they were not there, visions that flickered in and out of his eyes as he groaned and yanked at his chains, trying to bring his hands up to his face to at least brace it with pressure. They were bound with thick metal to the shackles around his ankles and knees, and so he was denied this small relief.

“You should at least let me give him some morphine.”

“You were brought on as a medic for OUR men, doctor. Not this guy.”

“What he’s going through right now isn’t humane.”

“He deserves it.”

“No, he deserves to go to prison. This is a bad man, yes, but you are not a bad person. Are you really going to let being vindictive get in the way of doing the right thing?”

“…Give him the morphine.”

There was a stab to his leg, barely noticed except for the small wave of relief it brought to him. It was almost nothing, but to a man dying of thirst, even the smallest trickle of water is rapture. The shades that had before flicked to and from his reality were more solid now, their guns trained on him. Barsad was not among them. This worried him to the degree that he was able to feel worry. He wondered briefly if in the blind rage pain had brought him that he had injured his brother as well as his foes.

“Commendable,” the words were hard to speak; he could feel the twists and nicks in his lips now when before they were always numb.

Uneasily, the officers glanced at one another. A medic among them was carefully disposing of his syringe.

“What’s that?” one of the men trained on him finally seemed unable to resist asking.

“The explosion, of course. To kill my second in command is no small feat.”

The man’s eyes narrowed in confusion. “We didn’t kil—”

“Idiot!” the woman beside him snapped out and jabbed the butt of her rifle into his ribs.

Bane let his head drop back onto the cool metal of the vehicle’s wall. He had the information he needed, and could do nothing else in this moment. He would wait. He had waited eight years to see Talia’s plan come to fruition. He would last a car ride.

_______________

  
The horrible ringing in his ears did not stop for days. Barsad briefly considered composing a horrible song to its sharp tune, but surely he had better things to do. He just could not think of what those were at the time while he languished in his cot. He was not a man opposed to waiting, but he did not know what he was waiting for. He had not seen Bane since their capture. In fact, Barsad had not seen anyone beyond brief flashes of guards and a doctor who had taken a look at his ears and ordered him into the medical ward, or that is at least what Barsad assumed had been ordered as he had not been able to hear the words spoken before he was suddenly being escorted to a small room and handcuffed to a bed.

Now meals were brought to him, and he was taken to relieve himself by an armed guard every few hours. It was honestly not the most unfriendly treatment he had ever witnessed, but Barsad had pressing things to do. Bane was alive, he was sure of that, but what he didn’t know was if he was trapped within the same walls as himself.

Each day he was seen to by the doctor who was genial enough, who poked at his ears fearlessly even while he would curse at him. His hearing was coming back slowly, and soon he was able to hear the doctor when he said that he should suffer little permanent damage though full recovery would take some time.

He had smiled politely and thanked the doctor, charming him by apologizing for being gruff when he ‘mauled’ at his ears. The doctor had laughed and they began to banter on visits. Barsad noted that he could easily have been discharged to the main prison cells by now. He worked his game well; he had often been used by his sister to gather intel on situations to determine what approach they would take. This turned out to be no different. So he charmed, asked careful questions, and was held much longer in the medical ward then needed.

It took about a week to learn that Bane was indeed in the same prison he was being held in; not Black Gate, they were no longer in Gotham, no longer even in the same state. Bane was receiving medical attention, as well.

“It’s a shame, what happened to the man’s face,” the doctor had remarked. “They had me look at it, to see if it could be treated, but injuries like that, it’s like the doctor trying to help him was blind, deaf, and dumb, anything I could do beyond medication would make it worse.”

Barsad’s stomach dropped at that, and he fought hard to maintain the casual, cheerful smile on his face. “You’ve seen it, then? He usually wears something to cover it.”

“Not from what I’ve seen. Doesn’t exactly fit the prison dress code to be allowed to wear something over one’s face, now does it?”

“No, I suppose not,” was all he was able to reply as the doctor gave his hand a cheerful pat and left. Bane was here, without his mask, most likely barely being fed enough painkillers to keep him coherent, if that. He could not wait for his word, then. Barsad would need to see to him, to do something to help him enough that Bane would be able to formulate a plan and get them to their little bird.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bruce tracking people the people he cares about via tracers in their neck is something actually mentioned in the novelization of TDKR so I thought I'd add it in here as a bit of a nod to that. ^^


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning for this chapter: Mention of suicide watch. No actual thoughts about it but I wanted to be sure to mention it.

_______________

  
If Bruce offered to play one more game of go fish with him, Blake was going to shove the deck of cards down his throat and light them on fire, if he could get a hold of a lighter. Bruce was like one of those kids that found out one thing had worked so they kept trying that one thing over and over again.

“Rummy?” he’d asked the day after his capture, when Blake had woken up feeling sick and lonely.

“We could play war?” he had suggested after Blake threw his tray of food at the ugly wallpaper a week later in frustration.

“What about poker?” when he’d just been about able to bring himself to consider asking if he could just paint the walls himself to have something to do.

“Bruce. I swear to God. I will actually kill you if you don’t stop trying to play cards with me,” he finally snapped out as he went through his training exercises on the hardwood floor. Bruce had finally left, but Blake was pretty sure it was to go pout about his poor people skills. Blake was unmoved by his plight. A short while later, Gordon stepped into his room and Blake finished his crunches before he laid back to look up at him.

“How you holding up, son?”

“Great. When can I go?” he replied glibly. Blake felt bad every time he was rude to Gordon, even though Gordon took it like a goddamn saint; maybe that’s what made it so bad. Gordon understood. Gordon cared about him. Bruce cared, but he cared out of guilt. Gordon knew him, they had spent months living under the same roof, talking, swapping stories, sharing dreams. During occupation, Gordon became the father he wished he could have, and now he was disappointing him. Blake understood why he was doing what he was doing, and it was touching, but he needed him to let him go.

“Not yet, I’m afraid. Did you want to talk today?”

Blake considered shaking his head. It was a casual offer Gordon made every morning, like he was remarking on the weather, not that Blake knew it, or sports. Blake would shake his head and the issue was dropped, Gordon would talk instead, about his kids, about the job, then they would actually play some cards because Gordon always seemed able to sense when it was something Blake would like to do, not something he was offering because he didn’t know how to handle people.

He really didn’t want to talk about Bane and Barsad, not with Gordon, but he was coming to realize that maybe if he did, he could convince Gordon he was ‘better’ and he could get the hell out of here.

“About what?” he finally asked, grabbing a towel and rubbing the sweat from his neck. He’d been going through every training exercise they had taught him, it killed time and there was no reason he should let himself get out of shape.

“How about whatever you want to talk about, son?” Gordon replied, walking over to sit casually on a chair. The chairs were new; Blake had learned that he had been on suicide watch of all things his first few days here, hence the sparse furnishings. Now that they realized he wasn’t exactly going to string himself up by his shoelaces, his room had been filled with some chairs, a TV, some books, things to kill the time, and the small adjacent bathroom had been unlocked for him to use when he pleased instead of having to knock on the outside door and ask for the key like he was in grade school.

“I want to talk about whatever you want me to talk about so this is over with faster.” He tossed the towel onto the bed and flopped down onto a chair, shooting Gordon a serious look. “I mean it. I’m not some fucking glass doll; just tell me what you want to hear.”

Gordon studied him for a few moments then nodded. “Let’s talk about them, then.”

“What about them?”

“If we let you go out there now, what would you do?”

He almost rolled his eyes. “Go join the father and live out the rest of my days as a priest.”

Gordon chuckled politely at that and adjusted his coat a little. “How about we don’t play this game, son? You’re better than that.”

He was right. Gordon deserved better than some smartass response. “I’d get them out.”

“They’re criminals; they’ve killed and hurt a lot of people. Does that seem right to you?” Gordon asked gently, no judgment in his voice. Blake realized that back in his interrogation days he must have made one hell of a ‘good cop.’

“I’ve killed people, too.” He glanced at Gordon whose eyes widened in sympathy then quickly amended, “Not with them, sir, as a cop.”

“That’s different, son, you were doing what you had to.”

“So were they. They were doing what they thought was right, too, and it’s not like that anymore. They won’t kill anyone unless I tell them to.” Blake hadn’t meant to say that much, he regretted it immediately, but he’d felt himself tense up with the desire to defend them. Bane and Barsad were both his, and now they served him; if you weren’t a killer, or a murderer, or trying to hurt Blake you had nothing to worry about from them. Blake had a hard time feeling guilty about that.

“Is that what was happening? Did they make you feel like you were in control of the situation?”

“I WAS in control of the situation,” he shot back, raking a hand through his hair.

“I know it felt like that, son. These are dangerous men, though. I don’t know what all went on. I didn’t ask to see those tapes, I know they’re private, but I know they hurt you and possibly made you feel pretty special, too?” Gordon ventured lightly.

Blake just nodded; there wasn’t any point in denying that initially Bane had hurt him. It hadn’t been without reason, though. It had been to keep him safe, immobilize him so he wouldn’t run away before he could be taught how important he was, before he could figure out his true purpose in life. It had been done for Blake’s own good.

“Maybe you feel like they love you, care about you, maybe in some ways they do,” Gordon admitted, which Blake had to give him a little credit for. “But they’ve hurt you, John, and you can’t control them.”

Blake shook his head. “I DO control them. They follow me. You don’t understand it.”

“Then help me understand it, ok?  I’m trying to see it from your point of view.”

“Fine, you really want to know how it was? I am their GOD, sir; you can call me crazy all you like for that—”

“NO one is calling you crazy, son,” Gordon gently interrupted.

“Yeah, right, I don’t care if they are. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change things, because that’s what THEY believe. I’m their god, and they treat me like it, too. They listen to everything I say, they obey me, they fucking care about me like no one else ever has.” He felt his voice waver a little and he brought his closed hand to his mouth and grit his teeth, steadying his lip as is quivered slightly. “I just want them back,” he finally finished softly.

He heard the light scrape of wood against wood as Gordon stood up and walked over to pat his shoulder. “That has to be hard, son, to have found a family like that.” Damn if he didn’t truly sound sympathetic about it, too, and not even the least bit pitying. “This is going to be hard for a while, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it really is,” Blake agreed quietly.

“Can I show you something?” When Blake shrugged, Gordon drew an opened envelope out of his jacket pocket and took out a piece of paper, laying it in Blake’s lap.

Blake picked it up to look it over, eyes narrowing in confusion. “What am I looking at?”

“Toxicology report, when you were out the first night we drew a blood sample, to see what we were dealing with… There were a lot of unknown substances in your body, Blake.” Gordon sounded concerned.

Blake studied the paper, still confused. “What are you talking about?” It maybe made sense when he thought about it. He spent an awful lot of time near Bane’s mouth, he was sure to be huffing in some of the chemicals that had been puffed out when they were pressed against each other. Now that he thought about it, Barsad was always inoculating him against various diseases and chemical weapons.

The first week they had been in the apartment, Blake’s arm had felt like a pin cushion because Barsad had finally been able to set up a decent lab in the spare room and insisted on synthesizing every inoculation he could to keep Blake protected. He’d insisted that if he could not protect him on the streets where Blake fought, he could at least keep him safe from the invisible deadly intruders that one simply could not punch out.

“Blake, if they’ve been drugging you, to keep you… calmer—”

“Whoa, whoa, no one has been drugging me. I’m not stupid.”

“Of course not, son,” Gordon replied seriously. “They could have been slipping something into your food, your water. You said yourself that you’re their god. Maybe they were scared their god would leave them.”

“It wasn’t like THAT,” Blake insisted, feeling himself growing angry at the accusation, like he couldn’t tell his own emotions from some stupid drugs.

“You didn’t feel like maybe it was all making a little more sense every day, son? Like it would be easier to just listen? It doesn’t have to be enough to make you feel them, it could have been small doses with your meals, just to keep you a little calmer, make things a little easier to accept. Can we at least talk about that being a possibility?”

Maybe talking hadn’t been such a good idea, after all.

He hesitated, too long; Gordon sensed it and Blake knew it.

“Nothing that happened in that place was your fault; you were kept there against your will. Then maybe you were scared, I’d be scared, too, believe me, and you were hurt, I’ve been there, it was easier to just listen and eat. So you ate, and maybe things got a little easier every time you ate and every time you listened until you started to wonder why you weren’t listening to begin with.”

Blake’s fingers shook ever so slightly when he folded up the paper and handed it back to Gordon.

“I want you to go. I’m tired.”

“How about I stay, I’ll read a book. I don’t like the idea of you having to sleep alone.”

Blake hated that idea, too. He hated it even more than how much he hated Gordon in that moment, that he was just able to make him doubt himself. He nodded and walked over to the bed, sliding into it without another word and curling up to face the wall, picturing Bane behind him, a warm hand cupping his shoulder, Barsad’s head tucked into the hollow of his neck as his arm wrapped around his waist. It was a warm memory, and he had used it every night here to get to sleep, but now it felt just a little colder before he drifted off.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Brief suicidal thoughts. Again brief, like the last chapter but still mentioning!

Bruce was there the next morning, sitting where Gordon had, clearly having taken over his Blake-watching shift for him.

“I don’t want to play cards,” he shot out sleepily, sitting up and rubbing his eyes.

Bruce chuckled lightly and set his book down. Blake glanced at the title, _Quantum Physics_ ; the guy really just didn’t know how to do anything normal. “No cards. I kind of hate cards anyway,” he admitted.

“Aren’t billionaires supposed to love gambling?”

“I’m not a billionaire anymore, and you don’t have anything to gamble. I thought we’d go for a walk, instead.”

Blake was ready to jump out of bed at the idea, anything to get out of this stupid room, but he was still cautious. “Alright, fine. Why?”

“John… This really isn’t a prison. I really do want to help. I wish we could just give you run of the place, but I know how you were trained. You would be out of here in no time.”

“Yeah, you’re right, I would,” he said pointedly, shuffling over to the dresser to change. He held back a snort when Bruce glanced away. He’d grown up in a boys home, then on the force, then in a cave; he was far from body shy. “I’d do it faster than you, too.”

“Let’s not be too hasty in assuming that…”

“You’re old,” he pointed out, not caring how childish it sounded. “You’re not keeping up with training, I can tell. You think you could take out Bane, now? You couldn’t even take him out then, not really. You got angry and got a lucky blow or two to his mask and what good did it do you?”

Bruce’s eyes clouded over a bit at that. “Not a lot, I’ll admit. I’m sorry I couldn’t keep him from you, John.”

“I’m not.”

Bruce nodded in acknowledgement. “I know, but one day you will be.”

Pretentious fuck. He shot him a look. “I won’t be. They’re the best thing to ever happen to me.”

“John. He broke your arms, he whipped you. I saw everything that happened there. I know you don’t want to talk about it, but maybe it needs to be talked about. I saw you…” His voice trailed off.

“Fucking? Yeah, it’s pretty obvious you saw that.”

“I’m not judging you for it, John, you didn’t have a choice.”

Blake laughed, “Oh, I had a choice, and I chose to have sex. You didn’t even get to see the best parts, Bruce, when we actually had an apartment and a bed. Maybe I’ll send you some clips when I’m out of here, since you seem to get such a fucking kick out of watching me.”

He wished he had a camera to capture the delightful face Bruce was making. Maybe he would ask Gordon for the footage later.

“So, we going for that walk or what?”

_______________

  
Barsad finally found himself in a true cell. The doctor almost seemed sorry to see him go. Barsad had very little trust for doctors, but the man who had treated him had seemed decent enough.  Now he found himself sharing his room with another man. The moment he entered the cell, the man towered over him, reeking of a superiority complex and eyeing Barsad in a way that he had no right to do. It offended him not only for himself, but for his little bird, that another would think he could claim him.

He had not bothered to learn his name; instead, Barsad had beaten him into a neat submission the moment the guards’ backs were turned. It was almost humorous how quickly the man was felled. Barsad lifted the now wheezing man onto his cot and laid him out. His lips twisted into a bitter smile when he saw fearful eyes staring up at him from their quite bruised sockets.

“Now, then. I will require information about this place. Your injuries are not so severe that you will not live through them.” He pressed lightly onto a broken rib, hearing the man hiss and squirm under him. “Let us hope this remains to be the case.”

It did not take long to get the information he required. This prison worked very much the same as other prisons Barsad had had the displeasure of inhabiting. Prisons were like any other established community, there were the powerful and the weak, the rich and the poor. Barsad worked out who he would need to speak to in order to obtain what he needed.

Bartering, such a useful tool when one had no money. He merely had to let slip his skill with working chemicals before he found himself in audience with one of the larger gang leaders of the prison. It was much more convenient than selling his body to make trades; his backup plan. During time spent in the “community” area of the prison, he was quietly gestured over to a more isolated table. Barsad had to commend the leader of this particular group for the show of quiet controlled power; there was no manhandling or threats, he was simply beckoned and expected to come.

He walked over and sat on the bench across from a thin man. He was neat, hair combed into place with care, the sleeves of his jumpsuit rolled and tucked into place displaying dark arms covered in even darker ink, symbols of a life of power that had been hard earned. Though he was alone with him while he casually read the paper, Barsad knew to be careful with this man.

“You. You will make me drugs.” The man’s accent was soft, from the northwest of this country, if Barsad were to guess.

“Yes,” he agreed.

This seemed to surprise the man. He looked up from his paper. “Most bargain for their skills.”

“I have no need. You will give me what I want and I will give you more than you had hoped.”

A bold statement, perhaps, but the man before him seemed to appreciate it. He flashed a quick gleam of teeth at Barsad. “Yes, I think you will. Come, sit beside me and tell me what you want.”

Barsad rose and took his place beside the man. It was not without risk when he told him some of their tale, details omitted to be sure, but it came with reward. This man, Tuck, as he had come to learn was his name, was one who held high regards for loyalty.

“Your story is an interesting enough one. Tell me, though, you say you will give me more than I had hoped.”

Barsad smiled at him pleasantly. “You hold loyalty close to your heart, my friend; this is good. Now tell me, how do you feel about uprisings?”

_______________

  
Bane lay stretched out on his cot. The mercy of morphine had not been a repeated thing once he had been ushered into the medical ward and strapped down. He was given some sort of medication, but it was even weaker, even less of a noticeable thing, especially now combined with the harsher symptoms of withdrawal that seemed to worsen daily. He felt frozen; his body temperature had plummeted and in his mind he was back in the chilly dark of the pit at night, only there was none of the tiny flicker of flame that the sight of Talia had always brought to him.

Except there she was.

She swam into his vision, beautiful and whole. Bane tried to raise his hand to hold her once more, but his shackles prevented it, causing him to growl in rage over the indignation. Her laughter sparkled over him, airy and light, as though she found him silly. She was the only person who ever found him to be ‘silly.’

Her hand caressed down his arm. He could see it, but felt nothing. Only a phantom stood before him, a visage from his past. Bane was not one to believe in ghosts; this was most likely a hallucination brought on by withdrawal.

He indulged it anyway. It was a quiet reprieve to be able to focus on her, the way her weightless fingers ran down to his hand. He opened his palm, letting her play with his calloused fingers as she always had when she was bored as a child. He knew he should feel nothing, but the weight of the memory seemed to make her touch a tangible thing.

“Hello, old friend.” Her voice was ethereal. Bane felt a tear run down his cheek to hear it after so long when he thought it would only ever be in his memories. It was brushed away by her fingers, though truly it did not leave his face. He tried to open his mouth to speak, but she hushed him firmly and sat by his bedside, leaning over him like the graceful predator he knew her to be.

“Do you wish to come with me?”

Her voice was so welcoming. He knew what she was asking, then. It would be a simple thing to let go, to lose himself in madness, or perhaps even death. He considered it. He had long ago pledged himself to her; body and soul, both were hers to take. This was not her taking, though. She was asking his desire, and now he was pledged to another who still needed him. Slowly, he shook his head.

She smiled down at him as though pleased and amused at his choice.

“Good. Then you must endure.”

He nodded in agreement. He still followed her orders, after all. She leaned even closer, Bane felt as though he could smell her once again, her soft musk of sweat, hardship, and smoky firewood drifted to his flattened nostrils.

Then her perfect lips were against his own tattered ones, and he could feel it. The sweetness and the torment of touch there, an intimacy they have never shared in their lives together. It seared into his body, tore apart his soul, and then pieced it together with new strength. The moment was an eternity between them and still over too soon.

He closed his eyes, overwhelmed, and felt the brush of her hair by his ear.

“You must be strong for us, our protector. Rescue my little brother.”

With that, he felt her presence leave him, but the strength she had bestowed him lingered on.


	7. Chapter 7

_______________

  
Walking around the house was kind of… weird, actually. It was a rather large place, one of those homes that Blake would dream about living in as a kid. It was fairly empty, neat, like it had only just started being lived in, which Blake suspected was the case. In the living room, there were several officers with their feet up on a coffee table, chatting and watching TV. When he walked into the room, a couple of them sprang up and shook his hand, smiled, and were all around really great to him, like he was a hero or something.  

Which he kind of was, but not in the way they were thinking. He’d asked Bruce before they’d left his bedroom if anyone down there had known about his late night activities and no, that had been kept out of the details. As far as anyone knew here, Blake was under protective custody after being captured by Bane, and they were happy to do it.

“And none of them are wondering why they’re having to guard against me LEAVING?” he’d asked.

“Stockholm Syndrome,” Bruce replied, it seemed to be his favorite phrase lately.

“You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means,” he had shot back… and he didn’t even get a look of recognition. How had Bruce Wayne ever been his quasi-mentor?

So he shook hands, made nice. Some of the guys he recognized, he’d gone out to drinks with them or been backup for them, others just looked vaguely familiar and some he couldn’t place at all. They all knew him, though; he wondered if this was what being a celebrity felt like.  He’d have to ask Bruce later when he wasn’t skulking around in the corner keeping an eye on him as Blake was invited onto the couch to watch the game.

He had a beer thrust into his hand from the man sitting pressed up beside him. He was one of the ones who had looked vaguely familiar but he couldn’t remember where from. The guy had just chuckled dryly when it was obvious he couldn’t place him and introduced himself as Christopher, then assured him they had only met briefly on the day he’d evacuated them. One of the older officers, Marty, good guy actually, had looked slightly disapproving when Blake took a sip of the beer, like he was some teenager or something. Christopher had simply shot him a look in return.

“I think he could use a beer.”

And that was the end of the matter because Christopher also happened to be insanely well muscled, the sort of man you would have seen easily working as a bouncer or enforcer if he hadn’t been a cop. Blake glanced over him again in gratitude, briefly taking in his smooth brown skin and the way his thin black t-shirt was taut against his chest.

Great. Apparently he wasn’t just gay for Bane and Barsad anymore, not if he was enjoying the aesthetics of a former fellow officer. That was confusing. He should probably drink more beer.

So he did.

Four beers was apparently the limit for how long it took Bruce to come out from hiding against the corner of the hall. It wasn’t Blake’s limit, but he hadn’t actually drunk in a long time. During occupation, alcohol was worth its weight in gold, after it Blake had been too broke, then Barsad and Bane weren’t exactly drinking buddies and he was more of a social drinker anyway. So he was feeling pleasantly buzzed when he tossed Bruce a cold one from an ice bucket on the table. Bruce caught it and glanced at it in surprise before setting it down, probably more of a wine man, or brandy; Blake could see him drinking brandy.

“How are things going over here?”

“Oh, just fine,” Blake replied. Truth be told, he was feeling a lot better than he had in days. He was used to not being alone now, to enjoying quiet company; before Bruce came over no one had be particularly focused on him. They’d all watched the game on the TV instead, making a remark once in a while about a bad play.

“Did you want to see the rest of the house?”

“No, I’m fine here.” He really did; seeing the rest of the house meant maybe he could figure out a way to get out of it, but damn if he wasn’t feeling a little vindictive. He didn’t need Bruce coming on over like a dad trying to coax a wayward kid home.

“We’re just relaxing, Mr. Wayne,” Christopher spoke up politely, even protectively. From what Blake had gathered, the volunteers here obviously knew who Bruce was and that he was supposed to be dead, but everyone was playing a ridiculous tiptoe-around-the-issue dance and calling him Mr. Smith like that wasn’t completely ridiculous. So, credit to his new friend Chris there for putting an end to the bullshit. Marty had chuckled cautiously then the other officers around him were all smiling a little.

Bruce retreated back to the hall after that. Small victory won. Blake started to chat with the men a little more, open up. Later that day, he did eventually make it to see the rest of the house. He had been surprised to find out that a lot of the officers downstairs were at least partly living there. There was even a room for Gordon, though the poor guy barely had time to sleep anywhere.

Blake knew Gordon was working to see him as much as he could, and it was touching if not painful. Gordon was just so… logical, soothing, understanding. It made him question things that he knew he shouldn’t ever question, made solid foundations waver ever so lightly. He knew he was working on him, trying to chip away at the “brainwashing” that he felt had taken place in the cave, and fuck if it didn’t hurt. He’d ended up holding back tears more than once in front of the man and feeling humiliated for it even though Gordon never called him on it.

It was definitely time to get out of here. He didn’t know if he could wait for them anymore.

He spent the next couple of days in the common area a lot, chatting with the other officers. He tried to watch them as much as he could without being obvious. He was picking up little things; when shifts would change, who he’d probably be able to slip by the easiest, which one he thought might hesitate to fire a gun at him even if it was loaded with tranquilizers. He had been starting to pick up how to read people in his training; it was like predicting an enemy’s next attack.

He laid out his plans carefully. Mary had first shift guarding his door that night. She was a good shot, but if she didn’t have her caffeine she was terrible at keeping herself alert. That evening when Blake offered to get her coffee from the kitchen, he made sure it was decaf. Christopher, who, even with his training, Blake really wasn’t looking forward to taking on in a fight, had actually been unwittingly very helpful; he’d confided in Blake that he thought Jacob and Katie were having an affair and were sneaking off during guard duty, something he thought would give Blake a laugh, but instead told him exactly which area of the house he should be slipping out from—the front door.

That left Bruce. Bruce was a wild card, but he thought that maybe, if it was just the two of them, he’d be able to outrun him without too much trouble. He didn't want to run away period, he hated running honestly, he was better than that, but he didn’t want it to turn into an all-out fight. That would give way too much time for backup to arrive. He could do this. His bases were mostly covered, and as long as Gordon didn’t show up he was fine.

Of course Gordon came that night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it was a bit shorter today guys! That's just kinda how the cutoff worked. XD


	8. Chapter 8

Maybe he sensed Blake was feeling twitchy under his skin, maybe he had just learned to read people better than Blake could after his years on the force. He’d stepped into Blake’s room, giving him a kind smile that made Blake’s heart twist around unpleasantly. God, sometimes he really wanted to just be able to make Gordon happy for once, really happy, not the fake happy he always put on to help others. Gordon wasn’t angry, not like he was. It was more a resignation, that he’d accepted the world was a terrible place, but he still had hope in it, and he was going to quietly do what he could to make others feel better about it, too.

He was going to feel really terrible if he had to knock the guy out.

“I brought you a burger, son.” He tossed the bag lightly. Blake snagged it out of the air and couldn’t help but sniff hungrily at the fast food scent that was drifting up to his nose.

“Bane always scolds me when I eat junk food,” he admitted when he pulled the wrapped burger from the bag. “He can’t taste anymore, so he just doesn’t get it.”

“Oh yeah?” Gordon asked lightly enough, but was clearly taking in the information.

“Yeah, so Barsad would sneak out and eat it with me sometimes.” He smiled at the memory; it was a good one. It was pretty much impossible to sneak out on Bane. They’d slipped off like two teenagers dodging curfew and into the closest restaurant by their apartment, gorging on greasy noodles and fried dough. They'd traded stories and shared plates until their stomachs could take no more. Bane had been standing outside by the door of the eatery when they’d walked out. Even with the helmet on, Blake could tell he was amused, not angry. He’d merely escorted them back upstairs, where Blake absolutely did not spend the rest of the day in bed with a belly ache with Bane lightly rubbing his tummy because his stomach just wasn’t used to handling those kinds of foods anymore.

He took a large bite of the burger; he was going to tell Bane about it later, just to see his expression. Gordon had his own out and they ate in companionable silence for a while until waxy wrappers had been tossed in the trashcan by both.

“I hear you’ve been getting out more. How’s that going for you?”

He shrugged. “Pretty good, it feels weird; a lot of the guys here treat me kind of crazy when we first meet. Like they’re supposed to be keeping their gun trained on me, but they want to hug me at the same time. One of them did both. It was a little unnerving.”

Gordon chuckled. “They look up to you, even after you left the force. They all just want what’s best for you.”

Blake made a bit of a face at that but nodded. “I know. I know what’s best for me, though.”

“Do you really, son?”

“Of course.” He kept his voice firm. Shaky convictions aside, he wanted them back. He needed them back.

“I’m sorry, I just don’t see how being with them can be seen as what’s best for you,” Gordon replied.

“You don’t understand, sir—”

“Son, you know you don’t have to call me that, anymore.”

It felt like Gordon was always going to be a ‘sir’ in his head, so it seemed like a moot point, but he nodded a little. “You just don’t understand what it’s like.”

“I’m still trying to.”

“It’s family. It’s having family.” He tensed up as he spoke. He wasn’t supposed to be getting emotional, not now. He needed Gordon to see he was ok and head out for the night. “Do you know what that’s like, sir? To have a family, to have NOT had one your entire life, then finally get one and they care about you so much that they’d do anything for you, then have it ripped away?”

He saw the muscle on Gordon’s jaw twitch a little at that. The guy knew about family. His was miles away, too. If he could just make the guy see that keeping himself and Blake away from their families was no good for anyone, then maybe he’d understand. He didn’t have that kind of time, though. This was getting too hard. It was getting too late in the shift, and he couldn’t take Gordon rocking his foundation anymore.

He sniffed a little and rubbed at his eyes. “I’m sorry, could you just, maybe get me some water?” It was a cheap move. A really cheap move, and he felt bad that Gordon was nice enough to nod and walk into his bathroom to do it. A slammed door and a wedged chair under it later, and Blake was slipping out his bedroom door; they hadn’t been locking it anymore when he had visitors.  That is, right after he used the spare chair in his room to knock the camera in his room out. Fucking voyeurs.

He felt really bad about knocking out Mary. Really.

Though the floor beneath his bare feet was hardwood, he couldn’t help but be reminded of his early escape attempts from Bane. He used the memories to his advantage, remembering how to hold his body so it was the least noticeable in the softly lit halls. Night was his ally.

Jacob and Katie were completely screwing on the couch. Ew, he sat there during the day. Also, God, he missed sex. Luckily, they were loud enough that they didn’t even notice him slipping out the front door. He took off after that. He wasn’t sure which way to go; he hadn’t been able to even see the outside of this house before and had no idea where he was. He just knew he was getting out of here.

He started to run. His past memories were melding more with his present, and his adrenaline was driving him now. The terror of knowing Bane would find him, whip his feet, then tenderly care for all of the aches after; it had been a certainty he had at one time come to fear and rely on. Now he tapped into it on purpose, let himself get into that mind space. He’d planned on it, knew he would need the push, the threat of what would come if there was failure, because he knew there would be none here and he would be coddled and not told what he could do to improve himself, and he couldn’t take it.

His bare feet bit into gravel; in his mind it was the stones and sticks of the forest floor. He reached a gate, practically crashed into it, his palms shredded by slamming into the concrete post that held the metal poles in place. He shook the poles in an angry gesture before he finally started to climb over them. Even with his palms slicked up with blood, it was not too much for him. He had become so much more agile. He hoisted himself up over the fence and let himself drop onto the grass.

Bruce was there waiting.

Blake sucker punched him and ran when he opened his mouth to talk. Fair play was for losers.

Bruce was a lot faster than he should be.

He froze. There, across the quiet empty street, was Barsad’s bike propped up neatly, like he’d just gone to run an errand and would be back for it in no time. Blake knew the keys would be there; Barsad, probably rightfully so, never seemed to worry about it getting stolen. He ran towards it and hoisted his leg over the seat, cursing as he fumbled with the keys and wasted precious time.

The engine didn’t start.

Too late he could see bits of frayed wire sticking out of the chassis, a distraction, a trap. He’d never even considered the possibility. Bane didn't set traps for him, not like this. He was strong enough to bring him back on his own. He heard a soft whizzing noise and felt a sharp jab to his shoulder, a dart. He didn’t look over his shoulder, he just stumbled off the bike and ran.

He could feel his movements slowing, his vision blurring over. It wasn’t fair. He faltered and dropped his head back, his mind thick with a medicated exhaustion. It made everything blur together more. The sky was the forests, and when he felt a hand on his shoulder he stopped. He’d tried, Bane had caught him and now he would correct him and take care of him.

“Come on, son.” The words were soothing, but something was wrong in them. He was little bird, Robin, and though the word ‘son’ was comforting as well, it wasn’t what was needed.

He forced the words out of his mouth though he sounded slurred even to his own ears, “What did I do wrong?”

There was a pause and he felt his arm being guided over someone’s shoulder for support. “You didn’t do anything wrong. Come on, let’s get you home.”

He shook his head weakly. That was wrong. He had to know what he did wrong and what was right. How was he supposed to get better? How could he improve if no one taught him? But he was too weak to walk on his own, now, so he let himself be led back into a place where there would be no corrections that would make him stronger, where there were kind words but they were meant for John, not Robin; a place that wasn’t home at all, only a warm, secure case that was starting to wrap around him like a suffocating tomb.


	9. Chapter 9

Blake felt himself being carefully lowered onto his bed, which wasn’t his real bed at all. He curled in on himself, fighting the urge to roll onto his belly and present his feet, knowing it would be rebuffed and would most likely horrify them. He needed it though, he needed it so very badly. How was he supposed to learn? He felt ill from the tranquilizer running through his system; he hadn’t gotten quite enough to knock him out if he fought it, and fight it he did. It reminded him almost of the spray Barsad had knocked him out with once, and with that came the images of a warm fireplace and heat pouring from his body while Bane cooled him with the chill of his mask. He was feeling hot now and pressed his face into the pillow. He felt Gordon’s hand patting his shoulder.

“You should get some rest, son.”

He shook his head, curling up more. “Go away.”

“Someone should be here while you rest, John.”

“Go away before I punch you harder, Bruce,” he muttered then placed his palms against his heated forehead to attempt to cool it further.

“You got lucky,” came Bruce’s blunt reply.

“I can stay with him,” someone else was offering. He shifted and glanced back over his shoulder; Christopher was standing there with the other two. He didn’t want to deal with Bruce’s bullshit and Gordon’s kindness right now, and he seemed like a good medium if he had to have someone in here with him. Christopher knew how to shut up and would most likely just sit there until he fell asleep and leave.

“I don’t think tha—”

“Chris stays, you go,” he interrupted Bruce and shrugged away from Gordon’s touch on his shoulder.

“Alright, son, that's fine. I’ll be here to see you in the morning, ok?”

He nodded his agreement quietly and didn’t watch as they left, just listened to the door close and the quiet scrape of wood against the floor as the chair he’d thrown at the camera was righted and carried over beside his bed, and the slight creak it gave when it was filled with Christopher’s sizeable mass. He was a little too close, but he felt kind of awkward telling the guy to back off seeing as he’d just told him to stay and all. Really, though, he could see the guy’s shadow projecting on the wall in front of him, and it was clear he was watching him really closely.

“Are you well, little Robin?”

Blake had never mentioned his first name to anyone but Bruce or Gordon.

He spun around on the bed so fast he almost made himself throw up from the combination of drugs and sudden movement. His hand flew up to his own head and he felt Christopher’s large hand circling his wrist lightly to calm him. He tugged it away quickly as he stared.

“How the fuck did you know my name?”

Christopher smiled at him, it was a different smile than the easygoing grin he’d seen on him before in the living room while watching TV. It was like looking at an entirely different person. This one was so much more serious.

“All of your followers know your name, little Robin.”

He gaped at the stranger sitting in front of him; even his voice was deeper now, like he’d been working to keep it light and easy whenever he talked to others.

“Fuck… Fuck, is Christopher even your real name?”

‘Christopher’ chuckled deeply at his question and shook his head. “It is not, but it is easier for you to remember only one name, for now. You really do not remember me, do you?”

He shook his head.

“Most remember when someone is pointing a gun at their head.”

Holy shit.

When he said it, it clicked. They had only met briefly, but it really had been the day when Blake had liberated the other officers in the tunnels. His mind flashed back to being shoved over the mountain of debris, falling to his knees in front of the group of men; this was the man who had been in charge, who had demanded to know who he was before Blake had closed his eyes and prepared to die full of anger that he hadn't been able to at least free his comrades, and he hadn’t even recognized him. That fact either spoke for how good Christopher was at blending in, or how disjointed Blake’s mind was becoming.

“…How the fuck?” It was hard enough to focus doped up, but this was completely baffling.

“I was contacted, told to infiltrate. I have not been able to be alone with you. Thank you for taking out the camera,” Christopher replied calmly, flicking his thumb backwards to guesture to the smashed camera hanging loosly from the ceiling in bits.

“You’re welcome?”

“I am sorry you did not make it. It was a valiant effort from what I saw.”

“You… you were giving me tips, pointers,” Blake suddenly realized. “Can you get me out of here?” He sat up more.

“I cannot. I cannot guarantee that it would work, and if I try and fail, I will be discovered and no one else will be trusted enough to be able to infiltrate again.”

Blake slumped back down. “I can’t do it on my own. I fucking failed.”

“Our brother would tell you to try again.”

Blake made a frustrated noise. “No. He would correct me and tell me how to do it better.”

“Is that what you need?” Christopher asked casually. “I am here to serve you.”

Blake froze at the offer, and then felt the tension melt out of him. Finally. He nodded in relief. “Yes.”

He felt himself being studied for a minute before Christopher stood up and replied. “Lay out on your back. I can’t leave bruises. They could be noticed.”

A quick trip to the bathroom and the shoving of a chair under the bedroom door to bar it from sudden intrusion, and Christopher was back, sliding a bar of soap into one of the socks from Blake’s drawer. It was an old trick Blake remembered hearing about on the job. He lifted his shirt up gratefully, exposing his stomach, welcoming the discipline.

Christopher was not Bane, he was not as soothing, and the blows against Blake’s belly stung like a bitch whenever the bar was swung down against him, pain soon blossoming from the area and radiating outwards through his body, but it was such a relief, the way he could bite down into his arm and just accept the pain for what it was, an act that showed he was cared about, that he deserved to be taught better.

“It was foolish to go for the motorcycle,” Christopher critiqued.

Blake grunted at another strike and nodded in agreement. He wouldn’t fall for that again.

“However, the way you decked Mr. Wayne was a thing of beauty.”

Blake barked out a laugh that turned into a quiet cry of pain at an especially harsh blow. Finally, when he felt tears starting to leak out of the corners of his eyes from the increasing pain, he shook his head and Christopher immediately ceased his actions. He gave Blake a moment by going to put the soap back. Blake tried to compose himself a bit, rubbing his eyes. His sides and belly felt like they were one fire. He wished more than ever that Bane were here to cool them, but he also felt calmer, more focused. He panted from the exertion, sighing when he felt the back of a palm checking his forehead.

“Thank you,” he murmured softly.

“Anything I can give you, little bird.”

Blake’s eyes closed tightly at the name. “Just stay.”

“Of course...” The palm didn’t leave his forehead; it rubbed lightly against his temple, soothing the dull ache from the crash of adrenaline and drugs. “They had a message for you, little bird. They told me to remind you that they would always bring you home.”

Blake bit his lip firmly at that and nodded. Of course they would. They had promised. How could he have ever forgotten that? They would always bring him home.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Omg. You guys are all cracking me up over how much you want Blake and Christopher to get it on! XD I think my girlfriend might be the worst instigator in it too but she didn't mention it till all of YOU started in on it.

_______________

  
Solitary confinement for two weeks for shanking his bunkmate; bothersome. It wasn’t as though he had killed an honorable man. Still, what were they to do for punishment, imprison him longer? He had not even received an actual jail sentence, to his knowledge. If his understanding was correct, Bane and he had been “lost in the system,” no trial was to be held. Not that they would have been innocent of their crimes, but Barsad was amused at how easily the ideals of the American system of “justice” were swayed when convenient.

When the solitary sentence was over, he went to see Tuck as soon as he could. He assured Barsad that things were falling into place as planned. The materials Barsad requested had been obtained, as well, and he was soon put to work carefully crafting drugs in his now much emptier bunk when he knew the guards would not be casting their eyes on him. The materials were rough, the equipment he had to haphazardly construct himself with pieced-together tools, but soon he had his own little lab discretely hidden away.

It took several sleepless weeks to be able to work out what was needed, not the drugs for Tuck, those were as easy as could be and the man was quite happy to receive them. No, Barsad needed something that would be able to take his brother’s pain away to a degree where he would be able to lead them. He knew he could never hope to come close to replicating the vaporized venom that usually filled his brother’s lungs, but something had to be given that would aid him more than what was already being done for him. Barsad knew of the worthless pills Bane was being given daily. Tuck had slipped one into his hand for him to study; such weak things, they might has well have given him an aspirin.

Finally, Barsad smiled when he held in his hand a new small, red pill. He’d tested the formula himself the previous night, and when he woke up a few hours later sprawled out on his bunk and feeling numb, he was fairly certain he could call it a success. Visibly, it was no exact copy of the previous medication Bane had received, but a hurried doctor would never notice the slight differences.

He was able to have them switched by a member of Tuck’s gang. The man was becoming more and more of use to him; the drugs he supplied were making his gang very popular, Barsad, as well. He ended up in more than one fight, gang leaders arguing over him like a prize. Tuck tried to keep several members of his own gang with him. Barsad showed it was not needed at all. In the end, Tuck insisted they stay around him so that Barsad would stop getting himself sent to solitary confinement for killing other inmates.

_______________

  
The haze of pain around his brain was receding. Bane had no explanation for it, but he used it to his advantage. Since his vision of Talia, he had spent more of his time retreating deep into his mind; meditating, an old technique to force him to lose touch with pain and reality. Before, he had not been able to accomplish the act, but Talia’s strength lent to him her order, gave him the focus required. The meditation kept him saner; he could think more clearly, he simply could not react to his surroundings. Each day, he would allow his mind to surface when they fed him, medicated him, then he dove back down into the quiet reprieve.

This time, however, when he surfaced, the pain he was met with was to such a lesser degree than before, it was almost startling. There was no doubt that it was still there, raking over his face like sharp twisted nails, but those nails did not cut quite so deeply, the burn was now a bonfire, not an inferno. He was able to sit up for the first time in months. This alarmed the nearby guard, but Bane barely noticed him. He could think rationally and react to his surroundings once more.

His recovery seemingly baffled the doctor attending him. Bane paid the man little mind and did not bother responding to his questions. There was debate over what to do with him. He could hear the conversation, muffled through the doorway. No one had expected him to ever leave this bed. Perhaps they though the pain would truly take him. No matter. He heard them decide he was to be discharged from the medical ward into an inmate’s cell that had just found itself short one bedfellow. Convenient.

The guards who led him were amusingly nervous, young men given the job nobody else wanted, and now their fingers shook slightly as they walked. He paid them little mind and let himself be led into the general population. So, this was considered a prison. He was always bitterly entertained by how different the definition of such a word could be depending on what power was using it.

This was no pit. Instead, it showed actual promise. Men languished here, and boredom made the mind more easily malleable. He could easily work with such conditions. His new cellmate was ordered away from the door and he was ushered inside, as eagerly as Bane imagined these foolish young boys might hastily toss a spider out the door before slamming it shut.

He tilted his head curiously when Barsad turned to greet him. His disciple’s eyes lit up with quiet joy at their reunion.

“Tell me; did you kill your cellmate simply because you missed me?”

Barsad’s eyes widened slightly. He had never heard Bane speak to him before without the aid of the mask. He knew his voice and tone sounded different to his own ears, and the change seemed to surprise Barsad, as well. Finally, he smiled slightly at him.

“No, he snored… but I cannot say that I am displeased with the outcome.”

Bane made a soft noise of amusement and let his fingers delve into his brother’s hair, sifting through it to cup the side of his head. He watched as his eyes closed and he let his body loosen in weariness. Bane had no doubt that Barsad had been carrying on for all three of them to the best of his abilities. Now it was his turn to take up the lead. His brother would rest safe with him.

He dropped down heavily onto a bunk. His weight made the flimsy thing creak in protest, but it held. “Sit with me, my brother.”

Barsad nodded and let Bane guide him down, arrange them so that he sat between his thighs, his back pressed to his chest. Bane ran a hand down his Brother’s thigh, feeling the quiver of muscles there as he dug his fingers into them tightly, a possessive claim that made Barsad relax further into his hold.

“You are weary, my brother.”

“It is nothing,” Barsad assured him, groaning softly as the grip tightened enough to leave bruises. “I am tired,” he admitted finally and Bane loosened his hold.

“Rest, then.”

“We must speak,” Barsad protested lightly.

“And we will, but you are useless to plan with when you are already halfway to slumber,” He scolded lightly.

Barsad was wise enough not to push any further. He let his eyes droop closed. ”It is good to have you once more, my brother.”

Bane rubbed his thigh as he felt his brother’s breathing even out against him into a steady rise and fall of the chest. With his skilled eyes, he could put together much of the tale of Barsad’s workings without his brother filling him in. There were recognizable tools carefully hidden around the small cell. His disciple had many objects of his trade cleverly secured in plain sight where only those who knew such a trade would recognize them for what they were.

There was the faint scent of chemicals in the air, and Bane knew then without a doubt where his sudden recovery had come from; clever. Such a thing would require connections, and when Barsad woke he would commend him for setting things up so neatly for his welcoming. With the groundwork established, they would be reunited with their little bird soon enough.

_______________

  
Blake’s stomach was on fire when he was finally dragged, under duress, out of his sleep the morning after his failed escape attempt. His hair stuck straight up where his head had been pressed to his pillow, and his eyes were crusted mostly shut when he sat up and glared blearily at Bruce and his stupid, non-crusty, wide-awake face.

“What?” Blake mumbled sleepily and rubbed at his eyes, holding back a surprised hitch in his breath at how even the slight movement made his torso light up in pain. Damn, Christopher had done a good job. He wouldn’t be able to run for a couple of days, just like with Bane.

“I said, coffee?” Bruce held out a mug and suddenly in Blake’s eyes his face became just slightly less stupid. He took the mug and gulped down the hot brew, ignoring the way it scalded his mouth and throat on the way down.  When he felt slightly more awake and glanced over at Bruce, he noticed the slight purpling around his eye and smirked.

Bruce seemed to catch him and snorted when he took a drink from his own mug. “It really was a lucky shot.”

“Keep telling yourself that,” he returned pleasantly. Even with his failure the night before, he was in much better spirits. He wasn’t alone. Bane and Barsad had sent him a messenger, someone to keep an eye on him, someone who understood his purpose and how important it was that he got out of there. He understood why Christopher couldn’t risk helping him escape. A quick glance at the camera in the ceiling told him it had already been repaired while he was sleeping. Maybe he would be able to use him, though, to send a message back to them. Nothing detailed, something small, ‘I’m ok, I won’t fail you, P.S. Please don’t murder Bruce and Gordon’; short, sweet, and to the point.

Bruce was still there, sipping coffee and watching him quietly.

“You don’t have to be here, you know?”

“You shouldn’t be alone,” Bruce pointed out, like he’d somehow learned it on his own.

“You’re horrible company.”

Bruce snorted. “I know. I really am. I’m sorry.”

Blake set his drained mug down and shook his head. “I’ll be ok, really.”

“I could take you downstairs; spend some time with the other officers.”

“I’m not a cop anymore, Bruce, and I’m not exactly feeling like having a cold one with the guys. Could you just go? Camera’s up again, isn’t it? How about you just watch me through that… same effect.”

“It’s for your own—”

“Good? Yeah. So I’ve been fucking hearing. I was great until you stepped in, Bruce. I had never been happier until you decided to fuck it up and drag Gordon in with you.”

Blake saw him wince. Good, maybe he was finally getting to him. He stood up from his chair and picked up Blake’s empty mug. “I’m going. Gordon will be in later. Do you need anything?”

“Yeah. Lube,” he said flippantly to get a rise out of him. “A guy’s got needs.”

Bruce’s face took on an incredibly pinched expression and he left without another word. Blake thought he’d gotten the last laugh on that one until the bottle showed up quietly on his bedside table a few days later. Fuck, it had been a joke. His face reddened at the idea that Bruce had taken it seriously, and he tucked it into the drawer so Gordon didn’t see.

A couple of days later when he was lying in bed restlessly, he hesitated, then shrugged and rummaged around for the bottle.

Maybe he’d only been half-kidding anyway.

He shimmied out of his pajama pants—he would be happy for a day when he was finally trusted with pants that had more than an elastic waistband—and poured a good palmful of the slippery substance out into his hand. He was already half-hard from the idea. It had been a long fucking time and he hadn’t exactly been living like a monk with Bane and Barsad, more like getting fucked to sleep every night in place of a glass of warm milk.

Maybe being horny made him terrible at analogies.

He was about to take hold of himself when he paused and looked up in sudden realization at the camera. He considered it for a few moments. He was pretty sure Bruce was the only one who kept an eye on the camera, and Bruce had already seen him in a hot and steamy threesome more than once.

Fuck it.


	11. Chapter 11

By then the heat from his hand had warmed up the lube, so it felt pretty great when he wrapped his hand around himself. He watched as the excess dripped from his hand down the length of his cock, ran down his thighs and pooled a little onto the sheets; not like he did the laundry anyway. Blake drew in a breath before he closed his eyes and relaxed, starting out with some slick, light stroking up his length, feeling his arousal growing and his body flushing quickly, a combination of part shyness over doing this with a camera trained on him and half not having gotten any in months.

It felt cheap, but he couldn’t resist thinking of them, of imaging it was Bane’s hand on him. He had to tighten his grip to simulate it better, grunting softly at the change in pressure. Bane would always hold him just right as he rubbed his slicked thumb across the slit of him, gathering up the dribbles of precome that Blake’s cock would constantly release for him with even the slightest bit of coaxing on his part. It was almost embarrassing. Barsad had teased him once and told him how his cock liked to drool with anticipation for Bane. He’d been mortified, but had come all the faster in Bane’s hand for the taunt. Bane had looked just a little smug.

Barsad would be kissing him by now. He pictured their lips together, the way he would feel beard scratching lightly against his chin, how sometimes it would leave brush burns in the morning after their kisses got too frantic, which was quite often when Bane couldn’t keep his hands off of him, would stroke him to his edge then back away, leaving Blake squirming and frustrated and only wanting more of everything they both were offering.

He was panting now, his movements faster as he pumped his slippery fist in a smooth cycle. He missed them so much; it wasn’t enough. He’d become used to so much more than just his cock receiving attention. He tried to remember their individual scents as he rolled over onto his knees and elbow, one hand still gripping himself as he pressed his face tightly into the pillow. The pressure of the pillow in his mind was the firm press of Bane’s chest to his cheek and he imagined breathing him in.

He rocked into his fisted hand, letting out a low groan of frustration. Bane would be fingering him open by now, and his body damn well knew it. He felt suddenly very empty inside. He hadn’t ever done it himself, Bane had always loved being the one to work his fingers one by one into Blake’s tight ring of muscle, to stretch him open and tease him while Blake wriggled around and rocked greedily at his hand, but Blake needed more, and how hard could it be?

He let his shoulders take the brunt of his weight and switched hands so that his once clean hand was stroking up his cock and his lube-slippery fingers were sliding between his thighs, over the cleft of his ass to trail over the pucker there. He sucked in a breath of surprise. It was weird and awkward from this angle on the one hand, but Blake wasn’t really sure what other approach to take so he was willing to work with it. It took a little encouragement from himself to work the first finger in; he mimicked how Bane would rub along him and let out a soft whimper at how good the stretch of a second finger working in felt after so long.

He worked them carefully, starting off with slow pushes that matched how he thrust into his fist until slow just wasn’t working anymore and he began to pump his fingers into himself in earnest. He was letting out constant pants and sighs into the pillow now as his cock dripped down onto the sheets. How had he ever gotten off from just a hand around his cock before? He hadn't understood just how much Bane and Barsad had warped him, had reshaped even his body’s sexual desires until this point, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. He could picture them now, pressing into him, fucking him, rutting him again and again until he couldn’t see straight, until he felt like he couldn’t possibly come again, but then they’d tease and coax and touch and fuck until he was leaking out all over his belly from them both, nodding desperatly when they'd ask if he'd like to come just one more time. He always nodded. He wanted them with him so badly, and the first thing he was going to do when he saw them again was demand them. He cried out sharply into his pillow and shot his seed out into his fist where it splattered down onto the mattress, joining the rest of the mess there.  

He sighed and resettled himself, wiping his hands onto the sheet—god, he was glad he didn’t do laundry—and flopping over onto the somewhat cleaner side of the bed, feeling at least somewhat sated. It left a lot to be desired, he couldn’t reach like Bane’s fingers good, couldn’t find that perfect spot inside, but he did feel better. He glanced up at the camera as he considered slipping off for a brief post-masturbation snooze. He decided as he was drifting off that when he got out of here, he was going to track down the video from the camera and give it to Bane and Barsad for Christmas.

Bruce was mysteriously absent the next few days. Blake felt incredibly smug about it.

He was sitting in the kitchen, now, working on a plate of eggs while Gordon sipped his coffee. He had been given the run of the house in the sense that Bruce no longer shadowed him quite as closely if he was just going to the kitchen to eat breakfast or down to watch TV. Gordon had come in early that morning, and Blake was pretty sure from the weariness in his eyes that he hadn’t actually gone to bed the previous night.  Blake took a long look at him and slid his plate over the smooth wood of the table so it settled between them.

“You look like you could use breakfast more than me.”

Gordon chuckled and rubbed his eyes a little. “That bad, huh?”

“Stuff still as bad out there?”

“It’s… we’re working on it.” Gordon snagged his fork from him and took a bite of the eggs.

“You could probably use a little help,” Blake pointed out hintingly.

“Things will shape up; just have to keep on pressing on, kiddo.” Gordon gave him a weary smile. Anyone else calling him “kiddo” would have been insulting, but Blake just shook his head in amusement and snagged up Gordon’s mug, taking a sip of his coffee, then made a face. Weren’t hard-boiled detectives supposed to drink black coffee? This was swimming in sugar and cream. It had always been black during occupation, but apparently that had been simply because sugar and cream were nowhere to be found. He set it back on the table and looked at Gordon again, how worn he appeared, and thought about how much he could be helping him if he would just let him.

He decided hints were overrated. “You could give me back the suit.”

Gordon eyes darted towards the kitchen door, but Blake already knew they were alone so he wasn’t worried.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, son,” he finally said, taking another bite of eggs.

“Even if I were to ‘get better,’ what, do you think that’s going to make me want to stop helping people?”

“There are a lot of ways to help people.”

“You wanted Bruce back,” Blake pointed out, feeling angry at the double standard.

Gordon sighed and took another sip of his coffee before he gave Blake a steady look. “I didn’t know who Batman was. It’s a whole lot easier wanting someone to come back and risk their life when you don’t know who it is. I know who you are, and I don’t want to see you get hurt. You’ve been hurt enough.”

Blake swallowed at that and cleared his throat. “I’m… I’m careful, Gordon. I’m safe. They keep me safe.”

“They’re killers,” Gordon pointed out, but he looked away and walked his mug over to refill it. Blake studied him, the tired dip of his shoulders, his eyes. He could see uncertainty there, and it gave him hope. He could work with doubt.

“They do what’s necessary, Gordon. They do what you can’t. How many men did we lose? When the occupation happened and all of the scum we’d finally managed to put away in Black Gate spilled right back out?”

“A lot, but that’s not our call to make,” Gordon argued.

“You said so yourself. The rules are like shackles.”

Gordon stopped mid-pour and looked over at him in alarm. “Son… did you… take what I said to heart…? Is that why?”

Blake looked down and shrugged a little, wanting to avoid the look of guilt he just knew he’d put on Gordon’s face.

“Oh God…” He heard the quiet clink of the mug being set on the counter.

Blake stood up quickly and turned to him. “No, Gordon. You were right, ok? You were right, and I’m sorry I ever said your hands looked dirty. You made the right call when someone else wouldn’t have.”

He reached out and touched his arm lightly, squeezing his wrist over the cuff of his sleeve.  “It’s not always easy, to make the right call. You made it, though, and I’ve made it. You could let me get out of here right now,” he persuaded gently.

“I know you think that’s the right call—”

“Because it IS, sir.” He looked at him desperately. “It’s not the easy call, but it’s the right one, and you know all about those.”

Gordon brought his hand down to rest on top of his, squeezing it gently. “They’re not out there for you.”

“And if they were?”

Gordon shook his head. “Let’s not deal with what-ifs.”

“It’s not a what-if. They’ll come, Gordon. It’s only a matter of time, and when they do, I need you to make the right call, because I’m going to go with them, and no one is going to stop me, but I don’t want to lose you.”

“I don’t know what you think the right call there is, son, but if those men come for you, I’m as good as dead, anyway.”

“Not if I tell them no,” Blake argued firmly. He could see it in Gordon’s eyes, though; he didn’t believe him. He didn’t understand their relationship, still. If he did, maybe he could convince him. “When they come, just stand down, sir. There’s no need for anyone to get hurt. You’ll see, then.”

Gordon was hesitating. He could see it in his eyes. Maybe he could get everyone out of this alive, after all.

“They’re my family, Gordon. They’re going to do whatever it takes to bring me home, and that’s what I want.” He patted his hand in return before heading out of the kitchen and into the living room to sit with the other officers. He’d sowed his seeds and now he would have to nurture them and hope that they would be enough.


	12. Chapter 12

Barsad woke to the warm feeling of a hand languidly palming him through his pants. It was quite pleasant actually, much more so after so long a time of lost contact between them. He had done well not to think of the physical aspects of the relationship between the three of them, such a thing was much easier to focus on, however, when he could feel the light press of Bane’s thumb rubbing the base of his cock through the thin layer of his jumpsuit. Still slightly muzzy, feeling able to remain relaxed after wakening for the first time in many months, he moaned softly in appreciation. The hand stilled a moment, almost as though Bane had not been completely mindful of his actions.

Barsad shifted his head against his brother’s chest, feeling a slight twinge in his back muscles from his choice in sleeping positions, but otherwise well rested. He saw that his brother was thumbing through a small pile of notes he had been keeping, encrypted of course, about the progresses he had made. They were suggestions, mostly, the basic progress he had made, and anything he thought might help Bane formulate a plan for them.

He watched Bane’s face as he read and sometimes marked something down on the paper, looking at the marred beauty of it. Even though Barsad regularly changed Bane’s medication, he barely had time to do more than glance at it, any moment spent looking was a moment longer his brother was in unnecessary pain, and Barsad would not allow such a thing for a frivolous indulgence. Now, though, there was no reason not to. So, for a few brief moments, he watched his brother’s ragged lips and privately wished he could press his own to them without causing undue pain. Bane glanced at him and Barsad ducked his head, feeling sheepish, embarrassed at his thoughts, something he had not felt in quite some time. He shook off the idea and let his head settle back once more, picking up a page of notes that Bane had marked corrections and improvements on.

They worked in tandem through the day. Barsad would write his own comments and ideas down once Bane made his notes until Bane had roughed out the firm details of a clear-cut plan. Not a word was spoken between them, and none were needed. It was better that way, no risk of outer ears hearing them and no unnecessary pain brought onto Bane. Barsad knew the pills he had concocted were a mere pittance when compared to the relief the mask brought his brother, and that any speaking would pain him. Soon, though, things would be made right.

_______________

  
His brother’s notes were quite useful; they made the plan come easily to Bane’s mind, a blessing when the pain still addled it so. He could think now, and focus, but it was a hard thing. He used his brother’s body to ground him, a possessive hand on his person helped him concentrate on reality. He stroked idly as they worked, aware with some amusement of the slight squirms even his well-disciplined brother was unable to refrain from as the time passed, and Bane felt his cock swelling up to meet his touch. He set the last of the notes down beside them, feeling Barsad sigh and shift his hips slightly.

“May I please you brother?” he offered earnestly, tilting to look up to Bane.

Bane considered the tempting offer. However, his pain was at such a point now that the results could be dangerous even to one as strong as his brother, should he take him. There was little in the cell there that could be used as lubricant, and Bane knew saliva would not be enough to prevent tearing and subsequently possible infection should he let himself go at his brother while he felt as such. He knew from experience that Barsad would take it strikingly still, would spill out just as quickly from the painful attentions, so deep was his devotion, but it was not something that would benefit them now. In fact, the ensuing rendered immobility could hinder them. Now was simply not the time. He patted his thigh lightly an answer, a silent ‘no’ that Barsad accepted without question, as always.

Not long after, a guard passed by their cell. Barsad stood and walked over, accepting the strip of paper that had been slipped through their bars. He walked it over to Bane, unopened, who took it with curiosity. It was an update in information about their little bird, the first that their brother had been able to have smuggled to them from his post guarding their little Robin.  The writing was faded badly, creases marring where the paper had been folded and refolded again as it traveled through the system. He beckoned Barsad back to the cot where they read together.

First, was the important formal information of the house, the layout, the number of men guarding it, the traps set, Bane paused and made new marks on their notes, eagerness to hear of their little Robin was no excuse to let such vital information go to waste. Then there was the updates of their Robin, his struggles, the observations their brother made daily of his demeanor. It was troubling to Bane’s heart to hear of their Robin’s doubts with himself, with his place; such a soft prison as he was living in now was sure to wear down his resolve. To be blunt, Bane worried, and from the unease he could feel from his disciple beside him, he was not the only one.

Then, though, Bane’s lips curled as he smiled even through the pain to hear of their Robin’s snappish attitude with the Commissioner when they debated his captivity, how he had planned a daring escape attempt and would have succeeded if not for trickery on the part of the police. How he had desired the correction that would help him to learn and grow, and how their brother could hear the sounds of training still coming from his bedroom door every morning. Their little bird may have moments of doubt brought on by the constant wearing of the police, but he was strong still, he persevered. It gave Bane greater strength in return to know they would not be met with an uncertain little one who would have to be guided home, but with a strong Robin who would meet their return with joy and leave with them in stride.

Three words, in different handwriting, sloppier, bigger print, not encrypted, graced the paper after that section.

_Hurry up, dammit._

He heard Barsad’s soft snort of laughter when he reached the section and chuckled lightly with him, so very impatient. He ran a thumb lightly over the faded words from their little bird. A brief explanation followed that their little bird had insisted on at least being able to leave a small part of the message for them, then finally, the last section of information.

Mr. Bruce Wayne.

Returned from the dead it seemed, a parlor trick that Bane was certainly not amused by. From what he had learned of the events surrounding the detonation of the bomb, it seemed an impossible feat. Still, he lived on, spending his resurrected time trying to wear down their little bird, and had in fact been the one who had orchestrated much of what had occurred.  The message ended with a final note from his brother that their little bird was insisting on non-lethal force. Bane shook his head at the naiveté there. If their Robin was being kept from them by a hostile force, it was the only time that the oaths of obedience he had sworn would have no meaning to him. He would be upset with his actions, yes, but Bane was willing to endure the wrath of a god as long as it meant his god remained with him.

_______________

The note had been sent out a week or so ago. When Christopher had found time to talk to him about it in private, Blake had demanded to see it. It hadn’t done a lot of good because he had no idea what the little symbols on the page meant, so he’d asked for a pencil and after some insistence scribbled down his message. Christopher had read it and chuckled before tucking the paper away.

“Little Robin, you have asked me to tell them you do not wish them to kill...” his voice trailed off there, and Blake didn’t need him to finish the sentence. He knew that what he was asking might be completely ignored.

“I know, but if I can make it clear, that there’s no threat…”

Christopher had tilted his head slightly in curiosity, but he did not argue or ridicule. They had not had much interaction, it was hard to find times when they were truly alone, but Blake had quickly learned that he had the same dedication to him as Bane and Barsad. It had been unnerving at first, to feel eyes he didn’t know on him that held him up as a leader, a god, but it was something he let himself acclimate to quickly for the sake of the companionship there.

“Work your craft quickly then, little Robin,” Christopher finally said. “I suspect it will not be long, now.”

So Blake had a few weeks to convince Bane not to kill Bruce and Gordon, not to mention the entire group of officers that were there trying to keep him safe.

Shit.


	13. Chapter 13

He worked on Gordon the hardest. Blake asked for him when he wasn’t there, and as busy as he was, Gordon listened, showing up daily to spend time with him. It was like he knew something was drawing close, too, and they were both using their time with each other to grow closer, to try to keep the other safe when the storm finally hit. Blake knew he was safe, though, that the storm that was coming was actually his refuge; Gordon wasn’t.

Doubt was his tool, and he used it to gently chisel away at Gordon’s defenses.  Gordon had cracks in his pillar of virtues, cracks that had been there long before Blake had even met him, tiny slivers that formed from each injustice in Gotham that the man had seen with his own eyes. Those slivers had widened as time grew; bits and pieces of a once-strong pillar had crumbled, concrete left as nothing but dust when Harvey Dent had tried to destroy his family in the name of fate. Blake knew that now, he could see it. Gordon had lived through too much, and Blake knew he could break that pillar, send it crashing down so that Gordon would be forever buried in the rubble of his doubt.

He could never do that to Gordon. But Blake had been changed, he had been remade with his own core still intact, and maybe he could be the glue that reshaped Gordon, helped those cracks fill, helped smooth over the gaps and rebuild his morals into something that matched Blake’s own, something that would mean Gordon would be able to step aside when the time came.

Blake sat in his room now, waiting for Gordon to show up after his shift. He was not disappointed when he came through his door carrying a stack of folders that Blake had asked him to pull when he had left for work that morning.

“Good evening, sir.” Blake slid a cup of coffee towards him from the bedside table. Gordon paused and looked at it before setting the stack down, as if he was trying to pinpoint the exact moment in their relationship when the tides had turned, when it was Blake who had started quietly playing good cop and guiding Gordon to see what he wanted.

“Evening, son. What exactly did you want these for, then?”        

“I wanted to talk to you about them,” he responded, picking them up and spreading them out over the bed. Each held a mug shot, a raps sheet, and information about an individual. Some had a simple lettered tag labeled over their folder: ‘missing.’ He knew Gordon would recognize some of those names as ones that had popped up in the search results from the DNA on Blake’s tracers.

Gordon hesitated. “I’m not sure if this is something we should be talking about.”

“You don’t have to talk, then, just listen,” he replied, straightening the pages until ten names and lives were lined up in front of them. “I need you to understand. To understand how it works. I don’t just go out and decide on a whim who lives and who dies.”

He touched his hand lightly onto the red lettering of a man in his 60’s, calm, casual eyes and a sense of ease on the face of the man in the picture; Blake had remembered it from the night he had tagged him.

“Carl Winthrope,” he began, but Gordon cut him off.

“I know who he was, Blake.”

“And you couldn’t touch him.”

Gordon rubbed his hand over his face, but nodded. Blake had remembered him from his days on the force. The man had been suspected of killing his own son. There were two witnesses that saw him do it; hell, one had been his own little seven-year-old granddaughter. Winthrope had beaten his own boy to death when he had been allegedly trying to slip into the house and take his daughter away from the man, who had insisted the girl stay with him. The man was rich, though; a social climber who’d managed to get hooks into friends in high places and lawyers who had gotten him off clean.

“No, we couldn’t, but I’m guessing you did. Killing him doesn’t bring her father back, now does it?”

Blake shrugged. “No, but it saved her mother. I investigated; it’s what I do every time. I don’t put a tracer on someone if I haven’t read over every inch of their life. She was gunning for custody; he was planning a hit on her. Silvia Winthrope, 9 years old, gets to go live with her mother for the first time since she was two. The will her grandfather left behind will put her through college, take care of them both for a while. Carl Winthrope losing his life gave them back theirs.”

Gordon looked pained. “Do you think I didn’t know, son? Do you think I didn’t know that you would be smart about this? Jesus Christ, Blake! I KNOW you’re a good kid, I know that that you’d have your reasons!” Gordon shouted and Blake let him. He’d only heard him this angry a few times; when Foley had abandoned them, when he’d accused him of breaking his own moral code. Blake knew anger, and this was welcome.

“Then listen to them, sir,” he responded firmly, and went through each one. All of these men were from Blake’s very first week acting as a vigilante. Not all of them were dead, that was important. All of them had been investigated, whether they had caught Blake’s attention on the street while he was patrolling them or if they were remembered from his past as an officer. Some had been chosen for Bane and Barsad to take care of, and others had not. Gordon didn’t want to listen, but the damning thing for him was that he did. He listened to Blake go through every story on why one was spared and another had to die, and Blake watched his reactions, listened to his arguments, and by the end of the discussion was fielding questions.

They were both worked up by the end, having had more than one shouting match over some of the files, which Blake wasn’t about to admit had actually felt kind of great. He missed arguing with someone that would actually yell back instead of just coddle him like if they had been here. It felt good to see Gordon treating him like he wasn’t broken, like he could take it. Gordon finally shook his head when they reached the bottom of the pile.

“Son, I know your reasons—”

Blake held his hand up to stop him. “It’s not about reasons, it’s what’s right, sir. This isn’t an easy choice, but you know that the easy choice isn’t the right one. You know all about it, sir. You made it. You’re trying to make it now, with me; none of this is legal, but here we are.”

“This isn’t KILLING someone.”

“Sometimes people need to die, Gordon. Think of it as the death penalty, with all of the bureaucratic red tape and bullshit gone; none of the class lines keeping people from justice.”

Gordon’s pillar was cracking further. Blake could see the very base, open and exposed.

“You can’t tell me, Gordon, you can’t tell me that there aren’t people in this world that just need to be taken out of it.”

Gordon couldn’t look at him; he only stared down at his empty mug in his hands. But when Blake put his hand on his back, Gordon did not pull away.

“It will never be easy to do the right thing, Gordon. I didn’t understand before, Gordon, how you could make the hard decision even when no one else would think it was right, but I do now. I get it, and I’m sorry because I’m going to ask you, to fucking beg you, to have to make it again.” Blake watched for a few long moments as Gordon’s grip tightened around his mug, until Blake briefly worried it might shatter in his hands. Finally, Blake watched as he took a long breath and blew it out slowly.

“What do you want from me, son?”

Blake let out his own breath of air that he’d been holding. Gordon’s cracks were filling in.

The trouble with Bruce was that he had no cracks.

Oh, Blake was sure he did, once; Bane had at one point filled him in on what he knew of Bruce’s past, his training, and what brought him to the league. Blake knew that you didn’t join a super-secret league of ninjas without having some questionable morals. Those days were gone, though, and now Bruce seemed uncrackable, like he’d gone through his own moral code with a trowel and some slapped-together concrete and had made a real mess of the place, just slathering that shit on until his pillar was some sort of uneven, confusing, tilted mess.

Damn, was it rock solid, though.

They were sparring. It had taken quite a lot of time to finally goad Bruce into it. They’d shoved his bed aside, and now Blake was doing very well holding his own; he felt like he was giving the old man a run for his money.

He only ended up laid out flat on his ass about four-fifths of the time. That was inspiring, right?

Ouch.

Bruce was still solid. Not nearly as solid as Bane, but Blake had to begrudgingly take back what he had said before about Bruce only getting lucky fighting Bane. That certainly wasn’t good. Blake was sure that, between Bane and Barsad, Bruce would be a smear on the wall, however. Not that he wanted THAT, either, but Blake was also sure that Bane would want to try and be sportsmanlike and have Barsad stay out of it.  
  
Blake didn’t want it to come down to a battle between them when, no matter who might win, Blake would be losing something. However, he didn’t know how to sway Bruce like he had Gordon. Bruce was the kind of man for whom actions were much more persuasive than words.

He grunted as he was slammed into the wall. A light dusting of plaster powder floated down from the ceiling onto his head; his hair was starting to look like he’d walked through a snowstorm from the repeated action. Apparently, Bruce wasn’t afraid of giving him a concussion. Blake growled and grabbed for the mug on his nightstand table, preparing to swing it at Bruce’s head.

They hadn’t actually strictly forbidden the use of weapons, after all.

Bruce’s foot was suddenly slamming into his wrist; the shock made Blake drop the cup and it clattered harmlessly onto the floor. Blake was startled at the unexpected move. It lacked the strength of Bruce’s usual blows, yet had disarmed him quite gracefully, actually, and was definitely not something the league had taught him.

“Where the hell did you learn that one?” he asked; he wasn’t about to apologize for trying to break a mug against Bruce’s face even when he’d been caught red-handed.

Bruce seemed surprised by the question as he lowered his foot, and then Blake saw what might have actually been the ghost of a smile flash over his lips. “Selina showed it to me.”

“Selina… Selina KYLE?” Blake asked in disbelief. He stared and rubbed at his wrist. “Don’t tell me you two…”

There it was again, that barely-there smile. Blake was floored by it. Maybe he should be re-evaluating Bruce’s moral code if he was shacking up with a cat burglar; no, no actually that level of hypocrisy seemed about right in Blake’s eyes at the moment.

“Where is she?”

“I have no idea.” Bruce shrugged, then, seeming to have decided that their session was over, started to push the furniture back into place.

“Do you miss her?”

The dresser Bruce had been scraping noisily against the floor halted in motion. “Yes, John.”

Blake sighed. “I miss them.”

“Tha—”

“So why is it ok for you to be hooking up with a convict, but not me?”

Bruce turned back around to face him. “Because the worst Selina will do is steal from me, not kill me.”

“You still don’t think I have a handle on the situation, do you? Well, I do, and I’m going to prove it to you, Bruce.” He couldn’t resist an annoyed jab of his fingers at Bruce’s chest before he stalked off to find Christopher.


	14. Chapter 14

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Speaking for long periods without the mask proved to be quite wearing, but it could not be helped. Barsad had formulated their plan, and now it was Bane who was needed to put it into motion. All told, it was not hard to rally the men of the prison. When guards paid them little mind, Bane had no trouble assembling them by groups to hear his truth. For many, his reputation preceded him, and once-fearless gang leaders scrambled to offer their private armies out of fear. The more wise offered them out of gladness, for they understood the revolution that would occur.

Each moment among the people was spent speaking, driving once-opposite forces to join together, whether by persuasive words or brute force, and both were doled out as needed. When Bane was satisfied with the army he had raised, he called for the second stage of the plan to commence.

The smuggling into the prison took an unusual turn at that point. What had once been a lucrative import business for all manner of things that might interest the prison populace had ground to a halt. What replaced it now were only cigarettes and chemicals; the prisoners would have to temporarily make do without different drugs, pornography, and other trivial items.

When he was returned to his cell, he found Barsad still carefully at work. Bane knew he hadn’t left the cell for days, so absorbed was he in his task; the pungent stink of chemicals and sweat was permeating the small quarters, but it was amusingly paid no mind by any passersby. When the guards left, Bane let himself drop down onto the cot with a weary droop of his shoulders. It was not hard to pretend to be at his full strength with an audience, but it quickly zapped his energy.

Barsad looked up from his work and carefully tucked it away before he walked over with a pill and some water for him. Bane swallowed it with a considerable amount of effort. The pills were becoming less effective with repeated use, but Bane knew they would not be required for much longer.

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Barsad was worried and quite tired. He would glad when this was over and they could reunite with their Robin, when Bane would finally be able to have the relief of the mask once more. His brother did not have to tell him that the pills he had created were becoming less useful; he wished he could work to improve them or increase the dosage, but the time needed to do so had to be spent elsewhere, not to mention the supply route was now also needed for other materials. Each pill he gave now was rationed out carefully to be sure there were enough to last.

He waited a few moments before he brought out a hand rolled cigarette for Bane’s inspection. “I have finished, I believe. Shall I test it?”

Bane plucked it from his fingers and studied it a moment before he nodded. “You will test it on me.”

Barsad nodded, not pleased with the thought, but knowing better than to argue when the rationale was sound. If the concoction failed, Barsad would be needed to be able to come up with a solution quickly, therefore it would be foolhardy to test it on himself. He nodded and pulled a book of matches from his pocket, sitting down beside his brother and reaching to light the cigarette between his fingers carefully, fanning the match’s flame out with a quick flick of his wrist.

Bane brought the cigarette to his torn lips and tried to seal them around it, but Barsad could see the hesitation there, how it pained him to do even that, let along to suck in the smoke. He boldly slid closer, hoisting his thigh over Bane’s own thicker one and straddling it to face him. Bane looked at him curiously when he took the cigarette from his fingers.

“Let me?”

He waited for the nod before he brought it to his own lips, sucking in a slow lungful of smoke. It burned them, the tar and nicotine warped together with the chemicals Barsad had laced into the tobacco. He did not hold it for long, not wanting the potency to be leached out by his lungs before it could reach Bane’s. He tucked the cigarette between his fingers and leaned forward, cupping his hands carefully around Bane’s cheeks, avoiding the scars and placing his own face close, slowly exhaling the smoke out, watching as the wispy trails were sucked in through Bane’s lips.

He repeated the process, sucking in another mouthful and sharing it between them. The nicotine buzzed lightly through his system, though its effects were dulled by the chemicals inside. He was so close to Bane’s bare mouth that he could feel his breath when he breathed out, not his breath laced with metal and analgesic, but his real breath, bare and smoky. Barsad licked his own lips and thought of how it would feel to kiss him. He would never dream of asking for such a thing, though, it was simply that he was not used to his brother being quite so accessible. Before, he had never even given thought to the idea of a kiss between them, but now when he set eyes on those scarred lips every day, ideas squirmed around in his brain, both pleasant and unwelcome in their temptation.

He continued to share the smoke with Bane in careful puffs until he felt enough had been inhaled. He crushed out the butt of the cigarette and reached to pull a rag from his pocket and a small vial, dousing it with the contents and holding his own breath as he brought the soaked rag up to Bane’s mouth. He was hesitant to put pressure there but Bane’s hand came up and clasped the rag to his face with a look of determination as he breathed deeply. Barsad watched him closely, for signs of changes in his eyes, for if he might have to back away, to rush and construct a cure.

Nothing happened.

Barsad drew the rag away from Bane’s mouth and smiled.

They waited a few moments longer to be sure, but the chemicals of the cloth seemed to be having no effect. Then Barsad watched as Bane tilted his head back to rest against the concrete wall. He could see the weariness and pain in his brother’s eyes even behind the satisfaction there of their plan coming to fruition.

“You have done well, brother.” Barsad felt Bane’s hand rub over his thigh. He was touched that he would waste his words to praise him.

“Thank you. I will send word and have Tuck work on distribution. The league waits only for our signal.”

Bane’s eyes closed and Barsad let his hand rub across the thick muscles of his abdomen, pressing his fingers in to work loose some of the pain-cramped muscles. Bane let loose a low groan and one of his eyes opened again to consider Barsad with mild curiosity.

“Do you not have more important work to attend to?”

“None comes to mind; the chemicals must sit, now. Please, let me provide some distraction from your discomfort?” Barsad asked softly, hopefully. It was perhaps selfish, but he craved to be able to serve his brother’s flesh and ease him after so long without doing so. Now that they truly had a moment of time for it, he did not wish to waste such a thing.

Bane’s brow furrowed. “You will not make yourself useless to me when the time comes to fight.”

Barsad could not keep back his grin. This was not a ‘no,’ it was thinly veiled concern.

“You have my word, of course, brother, that I will try to refrain from the temptation of getting swept away in pleasuring you and attempt to take you dry.” He held his hand up in solemn promise but his eyes twinkled in mischief from the over exaggerated oath.

Bane tilted his head and Barsad was briefly captivated by the way his lips twitched in amusement.

“Very well, see that you do.”

It was quick work to unbutton Bane’s jumpsuit and draw him from his pants. Barsad let his fingers run along him, coaxing the thick shaft into hardening under his guiding hands. He rubbed his thumb around the thin foreskin covering its head, drawing it back carefully, listening to the soft sounds Bane was making as he was slowly wound up, little noises that would have been lost within the low hiss of the mask. He cataloged each sound away carefully. He smiled of at the thought that soon he would be able to tell their little Robin about them, how Bane’s mouth was open and Barsad could see a flash of crooked teeth. Their Robin would take much delight in the idea that Bane could look, of all things, wanton.

Barsad brought up his hand and spit into it; it would have to do. He worked his saliva dampened thumb across Bane’s now exposed tip, teasing against the slit of it. He could feel muscles in Bane’s thigh ripple under him as a longer groan left his mouth. Barsad’s cock was pressing eagerly against his own pants, but he let it go, something he could see to later.

Now Bane’s hips were trying to rise to meet Barsad’s stroking hand, his breath was coming quicker. Barsad placed a light hand on his hip, well aware that he would not be able to hold Bane down if he did not wish it.

“Please, don’t waste your strength,” he requested quietly.

Bane’s precome was bubbling up from his slit now, and a steady trail began to run down and met Barsad’s fingers. He smoothed it over the hot length and wrapped his hand firmly around it. Bane grunted at the sudden change, but he heeded Barsad and did not buck into the grip. Barsad began to pump his hand in a sure, steady motion, preparing for the lengthy session this could turn out to be. Bane lasted long enough when Barsad or their Robin took him inside of them, let alone with the use of just a hand. He tightened his grip slightly more in acknowledgement of that.

A moment later, Bane was grunting, and Barsad nearly jumped in surprise to feel him spurting out, his come landing hot and sticky on his still moving hand. It was… unexpected.

“Like a schoolboy,” Barsad remarked, and then laughed at the light but still painful cuff he got to the back of his head.

“I do not…” For once Bane seemed unsure.

“The analgesics,” Barsad guessed. “They numb more than your face. Without them, you feel it more.”

“Ah.” Bane nodded, understanding then.

Barsad grinned and brought his hand up to taste the seed on his fingers. “If you would like to try again later, I could slow things down.”

Bane snorted and cleaned up before tucking himself away. “You will enjoy telling this to our little bird later, won’t you?”

Barsad grinned again and contemplated just that.

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	15. Chapter 15

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Something was happening. No one was telling him anything, but he could see it in the tightlipped looks as he passed by an officer. He asked where Gordon was, but no one would give him a straight answer. Christopher was nowhere to be seen, either, and that in itself was telling. He went to Bruce’s room to look for him, and it was locked up tight and empty. He sighed in annoyance and walked to the living room to try to get some sort of information.

All of the officers off duty were crowded around the television that was blaring news of a prison break. Blake felt his heart soar. This could not be a coincidence. It was finally happening. He tried not to feel relief as he scooted closer to the TV and watched dozens of inmates pouring out of the prison gates. Where were the guards? There seemed to be no one in the area except for the flood of prisoners. Blake tried to watch for Bane or Barsad, but it was impossible from the long distance view that was being streamed through satellite feed.

No wonder Christopher was missing. He raced up the stairs, ignoring the passing glances he got as he went into his room and dropped down to check under his bed. Bane and Barsad had not been the only ones planning. While they had worked on escape, Blake had worked with Christopher on their own plans. Blake wasn’t exactly going to play damsel in distress while they came and picked him up. If he did, that would result in a lot of officers getting hurt.

He couldn’t help but grin when he saw his suit carefully tucked away under the bed. He had no idea how Christopher had done it, but he’d swore he would, he just hadn’t been willing to do it until he knew Bane and Barsad would be there to assist. He glanced up at the cameras. Bruce was too busy to be watching, now. He pulled on his uniform quickly, feeling relief as each piece was strapped on.

He pulled out a small trigger button from his belt. It was a small innocuous little thing that he hadn’t actually used yet, though he’d heard stories of Bruce doing so, including one from Bane where he’d rather ineffectively tried to use it against him, so he kind of hoped it worked.

He pushed the button and watched as the world around him went dark.

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Bane’s world was in Technicolor: the red of the last handful of pills hastily swallowed to imbue him with the strength needed; the yellow lights of hundreds of matches going off at once; the green of chemical-laced smoke filling the air; the blue-grey fumes that suddenly filled the prison from the ground up, compliments of their brethren’s filling the underground water system with the fear chemicals designed for Gotham city so long ago. The league had held onto all of the weapons arsenal that it could; it had been, after all, gratefully accepted, and another microwave emitter had been in the midst of the other fine gadgetry.  The emitter had sat abandoned in Gotham’s sewers until such a time as now, when it had been smuggled through the state lines for such this task.

It was a simple plan, and with the knowledge that Mr. Wayne was otherwise occupied, Bane had been sure it would be the success that it was. The guards were around them now, screaming, thrashing about. Bane dispatched those who stood in his way with a quick, clean efficiency. Barsad was at his heel and covering their retreat in the same manner. A system had been in place and it had been followed well, with the knowledge that failure would be met with a brutal end. The keys were obtained and each cell opened before the next phase of the plan, only a handful tried to dart off first. Barsad had made short work of them, their blood spraying against the concrete walls.

The gates had taken some time to open, but it was truly amazing what could be accomplished with brute force. The other prisoners flooded out through the open gates, their minds protected by the chemical inoculation found in the laced cigarettes they all had smoked moments before word had been given and hell had risen up from beneath. The guards were mostly huddled now, many having locked themselves into cells and thrashing about against the unseen monsters preying on them.

The attack had been sudden, and the local law enforcement had not yet had time to respond to such a crisis. Bane watched as hundreds of escaped inmates flooded the area, most dashing about like mad dogs, trying to find cover. He suspected that most would be stupid enough to be rounded up in the following week or so. Others were more clever; he saw several unassuming cars being entered and driven off quickly. Now Barsad stood with him away from the crowd steadily trailing off. They were not waiting for a car.

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Barsad tilted his head up to search the sky, hearing it before he saw the chopper heading towards them in the darkness of the night. It was quieter than most, care had been taken to see that it stayed off the radar as long as possible. Barsad signaled to Bane, who was otherwise occupied dispatching a guard who had hurled himself at them like an animal. When alerted, he completed his task with a quick snap of his wrists and walked back over as a rope ladder fell from the sky.

Barsad covered Bane’s exit as he scaled the ladder before he followed him up. He dropped down onto the vinyl seating, letting himself breathe out a sigh of relief as the helicopter pulled away rapidly from the chaos below them. Finally success, but there was truly no time to celebrate; they would need to act quickly to rescue their Robin. Barsad suspected that the blood of many officers would be on their hands tonight. Such a thing would likely upset their little bird, but how could it be helped?

He looked to his brothers inside of the small space. Bane sat across from him, looking worn, and the chopper was so small their knees pressed against one another. Kojo was with them in the back, another was flying the small craft. Kojo had been a wise choice to bring along, even if it meant taking him for a short time from the watching of their Robin. He could give them news directly, now. At the moment, he was quickly opening up a small crate on the floor.  He reached inside and drew out a mask, newly crafted for Bane. Barsad was relieved to see it after so long.

He reached for it, studying its sturdy build for a moment to be sure it had been made to the previous specifications. All seemed to be in order. He looked towards Bane who looked strong still, but as though he was lagging, the fighting and keeping of order as only he could had worn on him. Barsad leaned closer to him, hesitating a moment, studying his face for just a few moments longer, knowing that he might not see it again beyond the brief changes in medication. His eyes darted to the scarred lips. He jolted when he heard a soft chuckle, looking up guiltily into Bane’s eyes.

“If you do not take the opportunity now, our Robin will surely berate you for it.”

Barsad ducked his head, glancing over to Kojo who was conveniently busying himself with speaking to the pilot. Opportunities such as these should never be wasted. He placed a careful hand, just the very tips of his fingers, really, on his brother’s cheek, mindful that with all of his strength, here he was most fragile. He wet his lips and leaned forward, gathering his courage before he pressed his lips to Bane’s. It was brief, barely more than the brush of lips and his tongue peeking out to trace lightly over the silvery twists and nicks of his brother’s lips, but it was perfect. He pulled back, feeling his brother's soft sigh of pleasure against his own lips and Barsad felt he must have been smiling like a pure fool as he gave Bane one last look and slid the mask over his face.

Kojo, seeming to sense the moment was over, settled back into his seat to face them. “Our leader has changed the plan.”

Barsad looked curiously at Bane, who looked equally as surprised. Kojo shook his head, and he looked rather proud. “Our Robin.”

Bane tilted his head, seeming to consider this. “And what has he said to you?”

Kojo chuckled softly. “That he got tired of waiting.”

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There was probably a special place in hell right now reserved for what he was doing. There were the sounds of panic all around him, officers who weren’t used to suddenly fighting in the darkness were surrounded by it, their imaginations, combined with the footage they had just seen on TV, surely doing them in. Blake’s eyes always adjusted quickly to the dark now, it was his ally, after all.

He was all too well aware of the risk he was taking. He should probably be running off into the night. He could have told Christopher a place for Bane and Barsad to meet him, and then they could high tail it out of Gotham, never to be heard from again. It would be the safer thing to do, right now. It would be less risky.

None of them were really the fleeing type.

Besides, Bruce was nothing if not the determined type. He may not have the connections and money he once did, but Blake had the feeling that if he ran, Bruce would follow. That was the last thing he wanted.

Did that really justify knocking out and tying up an entire room of police officers?

Maybe?


	16. Chapter 16

So, yeah. Special place in hell. With his armor back in place, he felt so much more at ease. He didn’t want to run, he wasn’t meant for it. Bane had taught him long ago that running wasn’t an option. It wasn’t hard to take out the closest officer and get a hold of their tranquilizer gun. He had his spikes, dipped in various chemicals from Barsad, but they were a little more… volatile than what he was sure were loaded into the darts. He just had to go through the house under cover of darkness and take out the officers there, tie them up, get them downstairs.

And holy shit, Marty had just pistol whipped him in the face, it was... pretty bad ass and extremely painful. Not bad at all for an older guy. Blake took a moment to be tremendously impressed and rub his jaw after he knocked him out and secured him.

Marty had actually put up the most fight. It wasn’t long until he had a dozen or so officers tied up in the living room area, mostly unconscious or on their way to it. He should feel really terrible about this. They were just trying to help. He hesitated, then, as he walked to the door. This was a point of no return as he opened the door and let the League of Shadows pour into the room.

He was surrounded, then; dozens of them filled the room, none of them bothered to wear masks. Some he almost recognized from the days of occupation, others he knew he had never seen before. All of them were watching him wordlessly. They all frankly looked like super human killing machines, muscles hidden under militant garb and red scarves marking their allegiance. It was more than a little intimidating. He was their leader, though; he just had to keep telling himself that.

“You have your orders,” he finally said, trying to keep his nervous tone steady. There were nods then the sounds of limp bodies being moved. Blake held back a sympathetic wince as one officer’s head was banged into the doorway on the way out. He’d given orders not to kill; it was probably asking a little too much to give orders to be gentle about it. A handful of men stayed with him, still watching him. Right, Bane didn’t exactly talk much unless spoken to either. He just had to keep that in mind.

“Spread out. They’ll be here soon. Don’t let them past the living room.” He knew he wouldn’t have to clarify who. He didn’t know where Gordon was, secretly he was wishing he wouldn’t show up at all, but he wasn’t going to get his hopes up. Still, things would be a lot less awkward and he’d worry a lot less if he only had to worry about keeping Bruce alive.

He could hear the sounds of fighting outside, the soft smack of a fist thudding into flesh.

“Where is he?!” He could hear the words growled out even from inside the living room. He ducked over to peer out the window.

How had Bruce even gotten a hold of a Batman outfit? Did he keep one on reserve at all times? That seemed a little insulting, actually. There he was, though, attacking a man who had been guarding the door. Gordon was there beside him, looking harried, his gun out and being used to hold another league member at bay. He looked unsure, perhaps anxious, even. Blake hoped that was a good sign.

He could hear the sound of the helicopter overhead. Showtime. He wanted desperately to run out and greet who he knew was inside that chopper, but now wasn’t the time. He deposited something he had liberated from Bruce’s bedroom onto the top of the TV stand, and took off back upstairs.

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Bane’s eyes narrowed at the scene below them. Mr. Wayne and the Commissioner were both locked in combat, attempting to keep their Robin from his rightful path. His mind was clear now, his mask back in place, and he felt right again with the world. He longed to crush the necks of these fiends, but Kojo had relayed to him their Robin’s instructions.

_“He says to come straight to the living room. Ignore everything else. He asks that you trust him in this.”_

As the helicopter came closer to the earth, several yards from the ground, Bane jumped out from it, feeling his boots crunch heavily onto the soft ground. Barsad landed gracefully beside him, a rifle tucked casually over his shoulder. Bane could see how he fingered the trigger as he watched the fighting. It would be so simple now to finish such nonsense with a bullet or two sent through foolish brains. He could not guarantee that was not how the night would end, but their little Robin was so insistent and he truly loathed the idea of disobeying him now, when he was so earnest and working so hard to make it right. Their little Robin was no damsel, he was their leader, and he must at least be given the opportunity to prove this. How could he expect his brothers to respect their leader if he could not obey him?

Bane looked on as the house he had been directed to flickered to life. What once had been dark was now lit up like a beacon. He watched as Mr. Wayne turned his attention to it and ran into the house. It was quite a foolish mistake, really; it was good for Mr. Wayne’s sake that their little Robin seemed to have his health in mind along with the commissioner’s, who followed him inside. Bane nodded to his brother and entered the house after them.

He brought his hand up to capture the fist that swung towards his throat upon entering; Mr. Wayne, still so quick to throw the first blow. There was power behind the attack, unlike their first battle, but not quite the same ferocity he was met with during their last. It was an intriguing difference, not one Bane chose to dwell long on as he grasped hold of his armored shoulders and slammed his own forehead, now protected once more by leather and metal, into Mr. Wayne’s unprotected jaw.

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Barsad’s grip on his rifle was tight with tension. This was something he thought he would never have to witness again. It had been unpleasant enough on the first viewing. He could remember standing high on the scaffolding in the city’s sewers, watching them bash one another’s bodies. He had tried to remain calm, neutral, but he knew he was nothing of the sort. He knew of Mr. Wayne’s training and his determination.

He had been enough to kill Talia’s father. Barsad felt he had reason to worry. He had let his finger glide over the trigger of his gun in quiet determination. He had known what it would have cost, should he have put a bullet through Mr. Wayne’s skull during their bout, the anger and displeasure he would have felt from both Bane and later Talia when they were reunited, but he would have endured it before he would risk his brother’s death before it was time.

That night, while they were on the jet, traveling to deliver Mr. Wayne to his new home, Bane had pulled him aside to the cargo hold. He had brought his hands up to his shoulders, grip tight enough to leave bruising fingerprints even through the layers of Barsad’s uniform.

“Do not think me so distracted, brother, that I did not notice your doubt.”

Barsad’s knees had turned to water at that moment as he was pressed into the unforgiving metal of the jet’s wall. Bane held him tight as he fought the urge to squirm. He had never doubted Bane before, not once, and that it had been noticed was unspeakable. There were no simple words that could be spoken that would make up for such a slight.

“A doubting disciple, our sister would have had me fling you into the pit in his place, brother.” One of Bane’s hands left his shoulder to hold his chin, forcing his eyes to meet his stern gaze.

Barsad had managed only a tight nod. He knew that. He knew that it would be hell to endure, to know that they had left this world without him, had fulfilled their destinies while he was left to rot.

He would have done it anyway.

Bane’s blunt nails dug into his chin as he studied him. Barsad had wondered if he would kill him then. It would have been deserved, but he could not have helped but hope he would be kept alive long enough to provide more assistance, and, more selfishly, to be able to see Talia’s face once more. Though, perhaps Bane would cast him into the pit right then, under his own volition, for it was clear he was devoted but he was not repentant.

His chin was let go and Bane’s mask was suddenly smooth and cold against his forehead.

“We will not speak of this to her.” Barsad could feel the words hissed out against his skin firmly before he was let go to sink down to his knees. He could feel his own body shiver with relief and he had dared not look up as he heard his brother leave the hold.

Now, here it was again. They bashed at each other, angry snarls from Mr. Wayne, and quiet, determined strength from Bane. They sent the small coffee table smashing into the wall, the couch overturned quickly after. Barsad heard the soft click of a gun being cocked and glanced over to the commissioner who, surprisingly, was not directing his weapon at either fighter, or even at Barsad. He was staring, clearly wanting to intervene, but not doing so. Barsad could sympathize. He briefly considered starting conversation, but thought that might be frowned upon. Bane went thundering past him, suddenly, slamming Mr. Wayne down into the now even further broken coffee table.

“Hey!”

All heads in the room snapped towards the noise. Bane’s hand stopped mid swing, Bruce’s leg mid kick.

It was the voice of their little bird. He was not in the room, however; the sound came from the direction of the television. He wasted no time in striding over to scoop up a handheld screen from it. All fighting aside, he felt himself smiling in relief to see their Robin’s visage staring up at him, clad in his uniform, standing in a bedroom and looking none too pleased.

“Hey. I can fucking hear you down there from all the way up here. Jesus Christ, and here I thought I’d have to worry about the camera only being one way.” Barsad glanced around the room. Bane looked torn between using the distraction to crush Mr. Wayne’s trachea, Wayne in turn struggling to get up off of the broken pieces of wood that had shattered to pieces under him. Commissioner Gordon walked over to the screen. Barsad inwardly commended him on his lack of fear in the situation, how he stood beside Barsad without a second thought and studied the screen, seeming just as relieved to see their Robin unharmed.

“Bane… Bruce... You need to listen to me and stop trying to kill each other for a minute.” Their Robin’s voice was tight with anxiety. Barsad stroked his thumb lightly over the screen, uneasy over the distress there.

“Bruce, all of the officers are in another of the abandoned houses. None of them have been hurt, but each one is being guarded by a league member. I have a com device in my hand.” Barsad watched as he paused to wave it about. “I give the word and they’re let go unharmed. You need to listen, though, to a couple of things, first.”

Mr. Wayne’s face was unreadable under the mask, his body language was not. He stilled then tensed. Their Robin could obviously not see the reaction and continued.

“Bane… Barsad... God, I’ve missed you.” He could hear the tremor in their Robin’s voice, it made his heart ache. “Bane, I need you to stop. Stop and just trust me and come upstairs with Barsad, ok? Bruce, Gordon, fuck if you’re here this is going to be embarrassing, but you stay there. You stay there and after this I send the word and the officers are cut loose.”

Barsad looked over to Bane who still stared down at Bruce, whose hands were clenched tight into fists. Barsad knew just how badly he wanted to end this. He had broken the bat beneath him more than once only to have him rise and defeat him in return, to let him go again, that was a true trial. Barsad suddenly realized that perhaps that was the point.

There was a long pause as their Robin stared up at the screen, his teeth biting nervously into his bottom lip before he drew in a breath. “Please… Please, Bane. I need you.”

Bane’s head dipped down slightly in quiet defeat at hearing the plea. He stood back, then, grunting as he rose up fully and walked towards the stairs. Barsad did not hesitate to follow, thrusting the screen into the bewildered commissioner’s hands as they ascended the staircase together.

_______________


	17. Chapter 17

_______________

  
The sound of fighting below his feet stopped. Oh god, he hoped that meant that they were coming for him and not that they had all killed one another. He’d thought long and hard about this, though, and he couldn’t see another way to prove that Bane and Barsad followed HIM, that they weren’t a threat to him, or any innocent person out there. What better way to prove it than to be able to call them off of the one man they both wished dead more than any other?

Well. That was the hope, anyway. So it was going to be really awkward if they had killed him.

Blake could hear heavy boot steps in the hall now, two pairs of them, and he ran to the door to fling it open. They were both standing there alive, fucking alive and ok.

“Fuck. Jesus Christ,” he muttered. He was sure he’d had more eloquent words picked out.

He was also pretty sure he promised himself he wasn’t going to cry, too.

He was being grabbed up, and he had never been happier to let himself go limp in someone’s hold. Bane was crushing him to his chest, his wide hand roaming all across his arms, his back, his neck, seeming to check every inch of him that he could, even though he was mostly covered by his suit. Then Barsad was behind him, his chest tight to his back, shoving him further into Bane’s grip, pressing his face to his neck, his cheek, kissing over them reverently, his beard scratching against Blake’s skin. He could feel them tight against him even through the suit, their strength, their devotion. He could hear the familiar soft hiss of Bane’s mask, Barsad’s light murmur of reverence against the shell of his ear. He could smell them and almost taste them and, in the end, he didn’t cry. He sobbed.

Barsad was shushing him softly, his lips rubbing over his ear. “We have you now, Robin. You have done so well.”

That was a lie. He’d done terribly. He hadn’t been able to get away on his own, or to help them, and now that they were together he was just standing there weak-kneed and sniveling between the two of them. He shook his head in denial then felt his hair threaded into by Bane’s fingers. They gripped and tilted him back lightly, until he was looking into the eyes of his protector.

“You have done very well,” Bane corrected him. “Not one of us could have done this alone. We all had a part to play.”

Blake took a breath to calm himself. Bane was right; if any one of them was meant to do this alone, well, then what was the point in them being together? He nodded and reached up to rest his hand against the curves of Bane’s mask. He could feel his breath puffing out against his fingers, and it was so familiar and wonderful that he couldn’t resist rubbing a fingertip along the grate of it.

Bane held his hair still, but his other hand came up and his calloused thumb rubbed over Blake’s lips. He pressed a kiss against it and couldn’t help but let out a relieved smile, one over which Bane proceeded to stroke every line of with the light press of his thumb. Barsad was mouthing lightly at his exposed neck; he could feel the light scrape of teeth over his flesh there. He sucked in a breath, feeling himself getting uncomfortably hard in his suit in much less time than he would ever care to admit. Bane was rubbing his scalp now, and Blake felt his eyelids lowering.

Right. There was a plan here, somewhere.

“Nmph. Wait. Just wait,” he protested lightly, giving Bane’s thumb a final kiss before he managed to worm out from between them. He turned back up towards the camera. “Bruce. I know you’re watching. I know even you can maybe get it into your head. They’re mine. I’m not stuck with them. I’m not someone you can rescue. They’re MINE.” He didn’t try to hold back the possessive tone in his voice. There was no point. “They obey me, and I just proved that to you. They could have killed you, they could have killed Gordon. They could have killed every police officer here. But instead, when I told them to come to me, to leave you alone? They listened. That is my proof to you. If you maybe needed more proof than that…”

Maybe he was feeling a little vindictive about the whole camera thing.

Bane seemed to be rather attuned to what he wanted now, if the sudden look of amusement in his eyes was anything to go by. He was pulled back over so that his back was to Bane, and Barsad wasted no time in pressing up to his front, brushing their lips together. Blake moaned softly, kissing at him hungrily. Bane pressed his mask to his ear, whispering into it as well as he could.

“Do you wish to prove yourself our ruler then, my little bird? Is it your desire to mount me in front of them?” He sounded fairly amused.

Blake’s eyes widened in shock and he winced against Barsad. He might have actually just bruised his cock with how hard it suddenly sprung up against the confines of his suit. He hadn’t thought of that. He hadn’t thought of doing it like that at all, and here Bane was offering sincerely to let Blake have him in full view of a man who he would above all want to prove his strength to. He hadn’t even done that with Barsad in the room; fuck, they hadn’t even done it in a room yet, just one mind-blowing fuck on an unmarked grave.

He wanted that. He really wanted to be inside of Bane again, maybe while Barsad was inside of him… He shook his head. He remembered just how out of control he was when they’d done it. He’d been a complete mess, even worse than what they made him into at other times. He was trying to prove he was in control, here, and he was pretty sure whimpering while he humped at Bane like he was a needy animal wasn’t the way to do it.

They’d pick that idea back up again later.

Bane merely nodded against him, rubbing the ridges of his mask into Blake’s neck as his hands went to grip tightly at his hips. Ok, so maybe he’d thought about suit-sex once or twice, but mental fantasies didn’t always match up with reality because right now he could barely feel Bane’s rough grip, which was something he couldn’t stand. He made an impatient noise and started to tug at the release points on his suit. Barsad chuckled and kissed him more deeply, working as a terrible distraction and making his fingers fumble over the hooks and catches. His cock couldn’t get itself under control with Bane’s breath rushing over his neck, Barsad’s tongue in his mouth; it was swelling to the point that it was truly starting to get painful pressed up tight in the suit with nowhere for it to go. He finally yanked back in frustration.   
  
“Will you just get this thing off of me already?”

“Having trouble?” Barsad teased, but aided him, stripping off each piece. As he was exposed down to his under armor, he sighed as the pressure in his pants was eased then bit his lip, letting his head fall back against Bane more as his fingers were rubbing across his chest. His nail scraped over the thin cloth covering his nipple, and his breath caught when Bane pulled and teased there until both were taut and poking up happily under his shirt.

His eyelids lowered, but through his lashes he could see Barsad grinning at him. He couldn’t help but give a little smile back and rock himself backwards towards Bane as Barsad nuzzled his chest, butting his forehead against it playfully before he dropped down onto a knee and dragged his chin and cheek firmly over the swell of Blake’s pants. He moaned in response. He could feel himself getting damp, his precome darkening the front of his pants as Barsad rubbed over it, licked at the material there and sucked at him through it, making a soft hum of approval against him that felt wonderful as it vibrated through him. He could feel himself leaking out more; his pants were going to be a mess. Who was he kidding? All of him was going to be a mess.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry to be a tease but this is how it worked best to break up the next few sections! Honest!


	18. Chapter 18

Bane was hard against him. Blake ground back along his length, feeling the heat even through the layers of their clothes. Both men were still clad in prison jumpsuits, and really, that was a kink he didn’t know he had until right then. That should be pretty questionable as a former police officer but he wasn't going to over think it now.

Bane groaned out low against his neck as he took hold of Blake’s hips once more, but this time Blake could feel it; each individual finger gripping tight into the muscles there, bruisingly tight. It had been so long since he’d worn those marks on his hips, since he’d put some of his own on them.

He brought his hands up and back to grab onto Bane’s shoulders, using the hold to brace himself as Barsad rolled his pants down slowly, exposing his slicked cock to the air. Before the cloth even left his thighs, Bane’s hand was curling around him, one hand still holding his hip steady. Blake let out a choked moan as Bane’s thumb smoothed his own precome into his skin, as he rubbed along the so sensitive vein running down his length.

“Oh, I have missed this, my little bird. How precious you look when you are overcome by your needs,” Bane spoke softly against his neck. “You are so lovely for us.”

He whimpered when Barsad pressed his lips against the crown of him in a wet, sloppy kiss that ended with his tongue swirling along him before he licked the smear of wet off his lips thoughtfully. “He looks about ready to come now, simply from this, brother,” Barsad half warned, half teased.

 Blake would be disgruntled if it weren’t absolutely true. He tried to rock up against Barsad’s mouth more, but he was held fast.

“Come on, come on,” he muttered. “You know you can make me go more than once, just let me have this one.”

Barsad chuckled and licked over the tip of him again. Blake jerked hard, managing to push into his mouth, letting out a low cry when his teeth scraped over him. It hurt, but it was so good and hot and fucking wet around him and Barsad was, thank god, finally sucking at him, enough that the sound was reaching his ears over the rush of blood pounding through them; careful, wet sounding slurps with his tongue pressed firm to the underside of his shaft. It was almost enough to send him over if Bane hadn’t just tightly secured his thumb and forefinger around the base of him to stave it off.

“No, no, no,” he whined softly. “Come on, not this now.” He brought his hand down to dig into Bane’s wrist.

“You do not wish to show Mr. Wayne your self-control?”

“Oh fuck, fuck that’s a low blow. The last thing I want to think about right now is him,” he grumbled. This had been a terrible, terrible plan. He just wanted to run off back to their apartment and get fucked into the mattress. Barsad pulled back to grin up at him and Blake glared down at him.

“It’s not funny,” he complained, groaning inwardly at how he could still hear the soft whine in his own voice.

“I was simply reminded of a story I must tell you later,” Barsad replied, licking out, letting his tongue flutter just under the crown of him. “Perhaps you will not feel so badly about your over-eagerness, then.”

He could hear Bane make a disgruntled noise behind him, and oh he was definitely going to make sure to get the story out of Barsad because Bane almost sounded embarrassed when he mumbled out a soft “Later” against Blake’s neck and pulled him away from Barsad’s reach, over to the bed. Blake scrambled onto it. It wasn’t nearly big enough to hold the three of them, which was quite problematic. He plopped down to sit on the edge and drew Barsad close, pulling him down by the collar of his suit for another kiss as he pulled at the buttons there; he was worked up, still, but buttons were a lot easier to handle than the intricate openings on his suit.

“Lube’s in the dresser,” he mumbled out to Bane, mouthing at Barsad’s throat, rasping his tongue over it when Barsad sighed and tilted his head back, exposing it to him more as he was stripped bare. He could hear Bane rummaging around in the bedside drawer. Blake glanced over then snorted at Bane’s inquisitive look as he held up the bottle. Yeah, ok, so what if it was half empty?

“You took a long time, ok?”

Barsad let out an amused sound, head still tilted back. “How did you use it?”

“Well if I have to explain it—”

Barsad cut him off with a quick peck to the corner of his mouth. “Did you finger yourself?”

Blake pushed at his shoulder. Grown men who have sex with escaped convicts do not blush, but it was a near thing. Barsad smiled and stroked a hand down his thigh. “You did. Did you think of us? It must have been beautiful to witness.”

“Yeah, well there’s probably camera footage somewhere,” he pointed out. Bane sat down beside him on the bed, and his added weight made the mattress dip down and creak in protest, pitching Blake against him, not that he minded. He tried to lean in more, but Bane put a hand to his chest and pushed him onto his back, instead.

“Will you let us see to you?” he asked, running a hand slowly down his chest. Blake blinked at the question, then flicked his eyes to the camera. Right. This wasn’t really an act, but it was a show, and Bane was smart to have him say it out loud. He nodded.  
  
“Yes. I want you to. Take me,” he said loud enough to be heard clearly, then paused and whispered. “Fuck… please tell me Gordon isn’t really out there.”

Bane quirked an eyebrow. Fuck. This was going to be embarrassing as hell, perhaps more so because he absolutely wasn’t going to get off any less from it. He let Barsad push his legs apart, drew them up to the bed and planted the flats of his heels to it, feeling the comforter bunch up a little between his toes. He tried to focus more on that than on just how exposed he felt like that. Bane ran his hand down his inner thigh, rubbing at the muscles there, his fingertips running along the crux of his thigh and making him shiver.

“Barsad will prepare you.”

He nodded. That sounded just fine to him, even if Barsad had never been the one to finger him and perhaps that should have set off a few warning bells in his head. Maybe some more should have gone off also when Barsad kneeled down in front of the bed and cupped his ass, ran his thumbs along the crease of him before he stretched them apart, exposing him further. He leaned forward and Blake startled slightly when he realized he could feel a hot breath puff out over his most intimate of areas.

“W-wait, what are yo— Nnn!” he stammered then cried out in shock as he felt the wet lick of Barsad’s tongue drag slowly across his hole. He couldn’t possibly be, no one really did that outside of porn, but Barsad was there, on his knees and running his tongue against his opening, lapping at it, making Blake spit out something that was supposed to be a protest but instead came out as pure gibberish as he brought his hands up to his face and covered it to hide the horrible red flush he felt radiating from it, to hold back the absolutely lewd little noises that he couldn’t keep from coming out of his mouth as Barsad licked his tight hole into a lax wet opening.

His breath was coming in ragged pants and he whimpered when Bane pulled his hands down from his face.

“Why are you hiding your pleasure, little one?” The bastard sounded amused as he stroked his cheek. “You are so flushed Does this of all things embarrass you? But you are enjoying it so clearly.”

“S-shut—NNn!” He was cut off and squirmed hard against the bedcovers when he felt Barsad pointing his tongue, pushing it in past the now relaxed ring of muscles. He was pressed tight to him there and Blake felt like such a girl, like he was wet down there for it, like he could come just from getting eaten out by Barsad’s tongue pushing into his center, the feeling of his beard tickling his sensitive thighs.

“Do you think that you might be brought off from merely his tongue, little bird?”

“O-oh fuck!” He choked on his moan, trying to bring his hands up to cover his face again, but Bane pinned his wrists above his head. He was so open and exposed and he hated and loved knowing that he was being seen at his most vulnerable, that he was showing them just what Bane and Barsad did to him, how good they made him feel, how safe he was. His cock was swollen red, now, and he couldn’t stop the sudden roll of his hips as he tried to push Barsad’s tongue deeper into him.

“F-fuck I want to!” He was damn well willing to try.

In the end, it wasn’t quite enough; maybe another time when he wasn’t so new to it and unable to relax fully from the embarrassment of being on camera, but oh he tried. He arched and moaned, feeling Barsad lap around his pucker, dipping his tongue in again and again, pointing it so that Blake could rock against it and let out a broken, frustrated keen when he was almost there but just couldn’t reach his climax.

“Bane, Bane please!” He tugged at his wrists, trying to yank them down so he could jerk himself. He could see the puddle of precome that was oozing out of him, pooling into his navel. Bane held him tight, though, and instead brought a single finger down to deliver a long stroke from the base of him, to the tip, pressing it down so it rubbed into the salty trail it was leaving. Blake let out a relieved sob and felt himself gushing out onto his belly in short bursts.

He shuddered when he felt Barsad place a gentle kiss to his opening and pat his thighs before he stood. He vaguely realized he was stepping into the bathroom, and he could hear the sounds of water running and… well, he was going to throw away that toothbrush. He panted, still feeling little shivers of pleasure running through his body. Bane finally released his wrists, standing up off the bed and moving to Barsad’s former place between his spread legs. Then there was lube actually being put to use, slicking up Bane’s fingers and being pushed into him.


	19. Chapter 19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nice long chapter because I love you all?

Blake let out a soft sigh; it felt good to have those fingers back. They were thicker than his, and he didn’t have to worry about angles or his wrist cramping. He could just lie back and rock against them and enjoy while he was carefully stretched open. He was feeling over-sensitized and it was almost too much, but Bane worked slowly, avoided his most sensitive spots, and worked to actually open him up more, not to tease, which Blake was grateful for. By the time Barsad stepped out of the bathroom and crawled onto the bed with him, Blake was feeling pleasantly full, moaning softly as Bane twisted a third, then a fourth slippery finger into him. Barsad leaned over him and Blake made a slight face when he kissed him but was relieved to taste only minty toothpaste.

_______________

  
Bane watched as they kissed beneath him, the little tremors that ran through their Robin’s body as he was stretched for him. He rubbed firmly into the muscle of his inner thigh, relieving the tensions as he worked his fingers in a slow rhythm. He was tight again, tighter then he had been before with rather regular play, even if he had been playing with himself he had not been doing so as often or with as much vigor as Barsad or Bane usually ended up taking him with. His brow furrowed in displeasure at that, the thought that their little one had been alone without them for so long. It had been a true test to leave Mr. Wayne in one piece and heed their Robin’s call. Even now, in the back of his mind, he was aware of his presence, that he was still alive when he should not be. 

“Nmph, hey.” Their Robin had pulled back from Barsad and brought a foot off the bed to nudge at him, his voice slightly hoarse already from the noises they drew from him. “Don’t. I’m right here. I need you.”

Bane tilted his head slightly, and then gave a single nod. Their Robin was a clever little thing. Though he burned with desire to end Mr. Wayne, he had no reason, no excuse, to do so if he was no longer a threat, and their Robin was determined to keep his mind from it in an amusing display to show that this was where his true desires lay. Very well. He would simply keep up his own end and show Mr. Wayne how well satisfied his former protégé was in his hands, that he could make their little bird sing.

He crooked his fingers and dragged them firmly against the hidden bundle of nerve endings inside of their Robin. His reaction was beautiful and immediate, a sharp curse as he writhed on the bed covers, his lovely cock twitching once more to life against his belly.

“Too soon?” he asked, as though he didn’t know the answer already from the way their Robin’s smooth heat clutched around him in response. He pushed slightly deeper still, delighted by how their Robin’s moans came again when his knuckles rubbed into the rim of him and he shook his head.

“No, no, come on, I’m ready,” he lied, but who was Bane to deny him?

He withdrew, cherishing the reluctant whine he received from such an action, the way their Robin watched him undress, how his hand was gripping onto Barsad’s hair as their disciple tongued and teased at the sensitive hollow behind his ear. His soft lips were a shade darker from their kisses and he was only slightly hard again, but Bane knew that, with encouragement, that would change quickly enough. When he was bare, he lubricated himself well; he was more than ready after watching their little bird come undone on their brother’s tongue.

Their Robin’s thighs shook slightly with strain when Bane moved closer to him, giving him pause. The fight, the adrenaline rush and crash there, then his recent spending were taking their toll on their Robin even though his desire was plainly clear. He cupped his hips and made to roll him into his belly to make their joining less effort on his part, so that he might lie still and take his pleasure from it. It was something they had done before after a long night, their Robin, sore from fighting, would lie shivering and grinding wantonly against the mattress as they each took a turn with him.

Now, though, their Robin’s hands covered his own quickly. “Like this,” he commanded, having clearly guessed Bane’s intention.

“You are tired,” he countered lightly, but let his hand pet over his flanks instead of twisting him.

“I’m good. I need it like this.” I need to see you, their Robin’s eyes told him clearly.

“I will carry you out of here over my shoulder,” Barsad remarked cheerfully, running a hand over his chest.

“Not if I carry you,” their Robin argued playfully. “I want you both together.”

Bane’s hand stilled in surprise and he looked down questioningly. He doubted the weight of their combined mass would be held on the small bed, nor that their Robin was quite ready for such an experience.

Barsad sensed the same and quirked his head, whispering into their Robin’s ear whose eyes at once grew comically wide.

“WHAT? Jesus, fuck no, I’d break! I meant I wanted you on top of me. Holy shit, am I glad you asked.” He stared at them both. Bane held back his laughter admirably well even as their disciple shook silently against their Robin’s side with his own. There was a long pause.

“…Do people even really do that?” He couldn’t seem to keep himself from asking in bewilderment. Barsad’s laughter became not quite so silent after that and even Bane could not hold back a low chuckle.

“It is not unheard of,” he finally replied. Their Robin shook his head in disbelief at that, but Bane could see the slight spark of curiosity in his eyes. Perhaps that was something to be explored later. For now, however, he handed the rapidly depleting bottle of lubricant over to his brother.

_______________

  
Barsad gratefully accepted the bottle, still chuckling lightly over their little Robin’s innocence. It was cut off with a sharp gasp, however, when he felt their Robin’s warm handle circle around his length. His head tossed back and he couldn’t refrain from the sharp shudder that jolted through him. Their Robin made a curious noise as he handled him lightly, rubbing his palm against him. Barsad could feel himself dribbling out onto his hand quickly.

“Look at you, so ready for me,” their Robin spoke softly.  Barsad had to smile at the smug tone. As if he needed to be told who he longed for. It was quite adorable, really.

“Forgive me in my over eagerness,” he apologized, though he knew it truly wasn’t minded. “I have not found opportunity to take care of myself since we were last together,” he explained, surprised at the sharp intake of breath from their Robin in response.

“Wait, you haven’t at all since… It’s been months, Barsad. Fuck.” He shook his head. “You have to start learning to take care of yourself for once,” he scolded. “You need it more than I did.”

He merely smiled in response. “It felt wrong to take care of it without you.” He felt himself being let go then pulled in for a kiss. Their little Robin seemed amusingly exasperated with him.

“You don’t even know how important you are,” He felt the words muttered fondly against his lips. That was untrue, though. He knew his worth exactly; they gave him unimaginable purpose and worth.

“Let me prepare myself for you?” he requested, then did just that, making easy work of opening himself up with slicked fingers. When he realized two sets of eyes were on him as he did so, he could not resist slowing down his motions into something he hoped was more sensual, it certainly felt nicer to himself anyway, and let a soft sigh fall from his lips. He could feel his brother’s warm hand trace down the bumps of his spine before he felt the push of his thumb at his entrance. He relaxed and pushed back onto it, moaning.

“I did not realize you were not taking care of yourself.” Bane sounded like he was perhaps admonishing him, as well. Barsad was momentarily baffled, but it was a hard thing to hold onto when his brother was rubbing inside of him.

“M-My apologies,” he managed. His hips were begging to rock back onto his brother’s hand, but he stilled them with effort.

“We will speak of it later. Take your place.” He felt his thumb pulled from him abruptly, and even with his own fingers still inside, he felt emptier. He hitched his leg smoothly over their Robin’s hips, smiling down at the hungry look in their little bird’s eyes. It was possessive, and Barsad could feel that in the way his hand now stroked up his leg, smooth, but firm. He was happy to be possessed, happy to feel Bane taking hold of their Robin beneath him and guiding them together. Their Robin was hard again, Barsad's and his own preperation having giving him time to recover and regrain interest.

It had been so long since they had been apart, Barsad could not hold back his cry as their Robin put a hand to his hip and pulled him down, pushed into him with a greedy shove that buried him inside. It burned and forced him open further, it made his body clench up in bliss. He wanted to close his eyes and revel in it, but he forced them back open; he knew what was coming, and he wanted very much to see it.

There it was, their little one’s mouth dropping open, the breathless little ‘ah’ that fell from his lips as Bane began to enter him. He did not need to see the actual penetration, he could read it in every twitch and reaction on their Robin’s face as Bane slipped into him. The tightening of his jaw as he first adjusted to the stretch, then the lovely flutter of his eyelids as he was fully seated inside. He could feel the fingers that held loosely onto his hips trembling. He reached to brush his hand over their Robin’s cheek soothingly.

His brother’s hand splayed out over his chest and pulled him back so that his back was pressed flat to his firm body. He could feel the sweat gather between them and the slight chill of metal and leather as Bane’s head moved to rest beside his own so that they could admire their Robin beneath them together. He was so beautiful, his chest heaving, his breaths panted out heavily through his nose. He could feel the motion of his brother beginning to thrust into their Robin, who arched under them, his mouth dropping open further into a moan, and Barsad moaned in time with him, unable to resist now rocking his own hips, feeling the wonderful stretch and pull of their Robin’s lovely cock as it moved in him.

Bane held him tight for a few moments longer. His hand roamed up to his throat and he tilted his head back as he felt his brother’s thumb and fingers caress over his windpipe in a manner that might terrify another, but simply made Barsad ache with desire. Then he was being pushed down so that he lay out over their Robin’s chest. His hips undulated, adjusting to the change in position, feeling his cock trapped between them and rubbing into the smooth skin of their Robin’s belly.

They were able to move in sync for a short time. Barsad rocked against their Robin, his lips pressed to his ear, worrying the shell of it between his teeth.

“So strong for us,” he assured him softly, unable to keep his own panting at bay, but he continued to whisper encouragements to him, knowing how well he responded to such things, feeling the little twitch in the muscles beneath whenever his words affected him.

“We missed you so much, our lovely Robin. Our god, we are yours.” He knew such words to him were sometimes shoved off with a roll of the eyes and a snort, but now their Robin drank them in, his nails digging into his back anxiously.

“Mine.”  It was practically a growl from the back of their Robin’s throat as he clawed into him, drawing thin beads of blood from his skin. He felt his orgasm rock through him suddenly at the rough claim; he cried out his pleasure and arched into the sharp, pin prickling sensation that ran down his back as he spilled out between them.

He could feel his brother’s movements quicken behind him, a thick finger rubbing over the scratch marks their Robin had made. He felt himself being pressed into by him then, sandwiched firmly between them, his lungs pleasantly compressed, making him feel secure even while they continued their own pleasure. He let out a sated laugh at the sharp creaking noises around them, because they really were going to break the bed in two.

_______________

  
He was probably going to suffocate, and he was pretty ok with that as long as this just didn’t stop. He jerked his hips up as much as he could, which, with the combined weight on top of him, was barely more than feeble twitches as he felt himself clench greedily around Bane whenever he pushed inside of him. Barsad was spent, but still so tight and hot around him, still seeming to enjoy the feeling of him being hard and churned around inside when Bane shoved down into them with enough force to rock them both. His second orgasm was slower coming as it usually was, but he could feel himself getting there, the hotness pooling down into his belly and the little shocks of pleasure that shot up his spine whenever Bane’s thrusts scraped the thickness of him right along his prostate.

He reached past Barsad who was still working at his ear, his neck, but he could barely even feel it anymore, all he could feel was the pressure all around him and Bane’s cock working his hole, hammering into him. He touched over his face with shaky fingers.

“Faster,” he grunted out, and he wasn’t sure how he was even forming the words. Bane’s eyes, which had been looking slightly hazy, sharpened and focused on him.

“Come on, faster,” he pleaded, giving a weak rock up. He could swear Bane was smirking. He could see it in his eyes before they lowered and he finally listened, and he was being driven into faster; he could feel the smack of skin against skin and hear the bed shaking violently under them. He grunted and tried to rock up more but it just wasn’t happening. He nudged Barsad a little.

“Come on, come on, move, just a little.”

He was relieved at the little nod against his neck. “Anything for you, little Robin.”

Then he could feel Barsad’s gentle rocking against him. It was smooth and steady, a stark contrast to the rough, uneven pushes of Bane working into him. He reached up for Bane’s hand, having to shove his arm a little to get his attention before their fingers were laced together and his hand was pinned back against the bed. He clung to Barsad’s shoulder with his other arm as he felt himself letting go, his climax being milked out of him by Bane’s animal like rutting and Barsad’s gentle rippling around him. He felt like he couldn’t breath; he shook soundlessly instead and just let it wash through him.

Bane’s grip on his fingers tightened almost to the point of pain. He squeezed them back and gave him a lazy smile, not caring how fucking wrecked he looked under them, not caring anymore who was watching. There was a rough jolt, it was too much when it jabbed against his prostate now. He was too spent for much more.

“Nmmph, Bane!” He was sure there were supposed to be words there, words like “come on, come inside of me,” but apparently “nmmph, Bane!” was all that was going to come out. Thankfully, fucked out gibberish seemed to be in Bane’s language repertoire, either that or he just really enjoyed Blake crying out his name. Probably that.

The thrusts inside him became brutal, pounding; he was oversensitive now from two orgasms, but he clenched and squeezed around him anyway. He wanted to watch him come just he had Barsad, like he knew they had watched him, and he wanted to feel his protector's warmth pouring into him. It was worth a few moments of raw nerves overreacting. His breath caught when Bane shoved them both forward again, his head clacked slightly into the wall and he felt the bed groaning in warning. Then Bane was shuddering above them both, his eyes closed, not tightly, almost relaxed through his pleasure as he filled him with his seed.

A moment later, the bed gave its final warning creak and the frame snapped beneath them. Blake oof’ed as the air was knocked from his lungs from the full weight of Bane and Barsad crashing down on him in a heap, Barsad yelped and Bane grunted in surprise, then there was a long moment of silence between them all. Bane was the first to break it with a rich deep laugh, Barsad and Blake following after a moment until they were all shaking with laughter at the ridiculousness of the moment. Finally, Blake smiled and stretched to hug them to him as much as was possible, briefly.

“Ok, that was great… now get off of me.”


	20. Chapter 20

There were more amused sounds as he felt both of their bodies leave him, Bane carefully working out, leaving Blake feeling more than a little sore as they both offered a hand to him. He waved them off and carefully stood, then stumbled right into Barsad, earning an amused look.

“I’m fine,” he mumbled then cleared his throat when his voice cracked slightly. He had just been through a lot, he was allowed to be a little wobbly in the knees and hoarse from yelling. His outfit was still in pieces on the floor, and that just was not getting put back on him again tonight. He rummaged around in his drawers and pulled on some softer lounge pants and a threadbare t-shirt. He was a mess under the clothing, it clung to sweat and other fluids he didn’t want to think about, but they’d spent an awful lot of time up here and he really did need to go down and talk to Bruce and maybe then bury his head in the ground and never look at Gordon again.

He glanced back at them as Barsad stretched his arms up high over his head and grunted, looking downright refreshed. Blake was really going to have to make him tell him the secret of how the man always seemed to just perk up after being freshly fucked, because Blake always wanted to drop down for a nap between them both afterwards. They dressed with him, Bane looking the most presentable among them, mostly because he didn’t have hair to screw up and hadn’t been one of the ones bottoming.

 Blake snorted when he was pulled over and Bane’s fingers ran through his hair in a futile attempt to smooth it down from how it had been pushed up into disarray after being ground into the bed. Blake pulled his hand down instead, and kissed over his knuckles.

“I call first shower.”

Bane let out an amused noise and flicked his thumb lightly over his bottom lip. “I believe there are more pressing matters to attend to, first.”

He sighed. Right. “Please don’t kill him.”

Bane made a noncommittal noise and Blake watched as he crossed his arms. Oh, he was not going to deal with Bane being petulant. That was something the world honestly wasn’t ready for.

“No, I’m serious. Please let me handle it.” He let his hand to rest over the thick muscle of Bane’s arm. It was tense, and he felt bad about that. This wasn’t really petulance. It was fear, maybe; he’d been taken once, Talia had been lost, and now he was being asked to step back when he was supposed to be the protector. Blake knew he was asking a lot. He rubbed soothingly into his skin.

“You follow my lead, right?”

Bane looked down at him for a long moment, studying him before he nodded. “Reluctantly, in this instance, but always, my little bird.”

Blake held back a relieved sigh and looked over at Barsad as he gathered his rifle back over his shoulder. He knew that Barsad would be able to keep much calmer about this if that was what Blake wanted. Still…

“Could you, uhm, maybe put on the safety on that thing?”

He got a flash of a grin in response. “If it makes you feel better, I could pretend it has one?”

Great.

“Just… no shooting.” He fixed him with a stern look. Leader? Yeah, right. Right now he felt like a parent.

“You have my word, unless it becomes an emergency situation,” Barsad swore.

“Yeah, well, keep in mind we’re talking MY idea of an emergency, not yours, or Bane’s.” He sighed in exasperation then; despite that, he couldn’t keep himself from giving Bane’s hand another kiss then moving over to press his lips to Barsad’s before he walked, and totally didn’t wobble, out the door.

Dead silence is not a great way to start a conversation.

Death glares, even less so.

When he walked down the steps and into the living room, Gordon had been leaning against the wall, rubbing a hand over his face, and that was about as long as he dared look at him, just long enough to see his gun had been tucked away. Now he just had to never establish eye contact with the man for the rest of their lives. Bruce was holding the screen tightly in his hands, and he looked up when he heard them approaching the room. He had been trying to prove a point with all of this, really, but now that it had happened he kind of felt a bit… speechless.

So he had to spend a few unpleasant moments watching as Bane and Bruce fixed each other with death glares, instead.

Surprisingly, Gordon was the one to break the silence.

“Well, son, that was a little more than I think I wanted to see.”

Blake wondered fleetingly if he could just run out the door right then, into the night.

“John,” Bruce began. “I know what you’re trying to do here—”

“Then hear me out, Bruce. They’re mine. I’m not being hurt. Gordon, please…” He forced himself to look at the other man, embarrassment be damned. He’d worked so hard on him, trying to make him understand, to at least see things from his point of view. If he could sway him…

Gordon sighed, then to Blake’s relief he nodded slowly. “I’m not sure I can ever really understand this, son. I do know that keeping you here isn’t doing you any good, either.” He looked towards Bruce and Blake knew; he wasn’t going to interfere, anymore. Blake could see Bruce’s eyes, even smudged with grease paint he could tell he knew it too. He took a step closer to Bruce, he could sense Bane and Barsad’s displeasure at the action, but they were going to have to deal with it for the moment.

He pulled the communications device out that he’d absentmindedly shoved into his pocket while they were getting dressed. Looking at Bruce he spoke into it, giving orders to release the police officers and disperse before pocketing it again.

“Listen closely Bruce. It’s just us here now. No one will help you with this anymore, Gordon isn't going to help with this again. I know you’re not doing this to hurt me, I know you’re really just trying to help, I get that, but you can’t help me, not how you want to. This is who I am and this is who I’m going to continue to be. So there are really only two options here. You can come out of retirement and take back the suit, and we’ll go. Trust me, I don’t like this option, but we will. We’ll get out of Gotham, find some other city or country or whatever that needs our help. Gotham isn’t the only place that needs saving and if we do that you won’t ever have to see nor hear from me again.”  
  
Bruce shook his head quickly. “John that’s the last thing I want. I gave you the suit for a reason.”  
  
Then there’s option two. You can let this one go Bruce, you can chalk it up as a draw. No losing, no winning, what simply is, is. You may not agree with all of my methods, but you don’t want to be here anymore, you don’t HAVE to be here anymore. Gotham is safe without you.”

“But, John, you’re not, Gordon’s not,” Bruce spoke earnestly and he meant it, he really meant it. The guy kept trying to take the whole world onto his shoulders when it just wasn’t needed and he sounded so TIRED from doing it too. He could be far away now, actually getting a chance to live his life and Blake finally felt a little angry at that, that Bruce wasn’t getting to actually LIVE. He’d saved an entire city full of lives and now he deserved a chance to go live his own.

“That’s bullshit!” he snapped. “You saw us; did I look unsafe to you? Gordon has been taking care of himself since before I was in diapers. We. Don’t. Need. You.”

Sometimes the truth needed to hurt to hit home. Bruce winced a little but shook his head.“What if that changes? People change, John.” He was looking at Bane, now. He was right, people did change, but that didn’t mean he was right about everything.

“Like I don’t know that? You think I don’t know how different I am? What do you want from me, Bruce? What is going to make you go? Not just for me, Bruce, for YOU. Selina is out there waiting for you, isn’t she? What is going to make you go back to her and forget about this?”

Bruce stared at him; Blake could see the tight clench of his jaw, the twitch of muscle there before he finally spoke. “Contact.”

Blake blinked. “Contact?”

“Every week, a letter, a call, a video, something that shows me that you’re ok. I can’t just walk away from this. I can’t just leave you to them with no way out of the situation.”

Blake stared and looked around the room for a long moment. Now all of his time spent here suddenly felt like some sort of ridiculously overblown custody battle between two sets of estranged parents. Maybe he should be flattered. Contact? That was one of the simplest requests he’d ever gotten, and it made sense, honestly. Bruce was fucking worried, and if hearing his voice telling him to fuck off once a week was enough to make him stop this… He took a chance and walked over to Bruce, slowly offering his hand.

“How do you feel about webcams?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the final stretch folks, only a couple chapters after this!


	21. Chapter 21

He limped slightly up the stairs, eyes drooping while Barsad strode in front of him, looking downright cheerful, the jerk. Bane was behind him, a hand steady on his back which he was in need of more than he cared to admit at the moment; besides, he liked it there. He wanted to shower so fucking bad, then drop down onto their bed and curl up with them around him, holding him tightly like the over-protective Dobermans they were sure to be after all of this. He was sticky. Very sticky; he could feel his pants clinging to his legs unpleasantly all the way back to their apartment in the jeep that had mysteriously been waiting empty for them, keys in the ignition.

The long moments after Bruce and Blake had shaken hands had still been… tense. He had just wanted to go, but that clearly wasn’t going to happen. Instead, they’d spent the next half hour or so discussing a schedule of all things, along with telephone numbers, P.O. boxes, email addresses, and Skype accounts; it was a little overwhelming, really. When they’d finally hashed out some sort of deal about it, they’d shaken hands again, all formal like, until Barsad had come over and casually put an arm over his shoulder.

“He needs rest.”

That had gotten a tight-lipped look from Bruce, who had at least removed the cowl; it was hard to negotiate seriously with a man in a cowl. Blake couldn't really say that his was completely over, not by a long shot, but this was improvement. He would just need to wait and see how it played out.

“He’s right. Kid needs his rest, he looks about to drop on his feet,” Gordon had agreed from his place by the couch. He hadn’t said much the entire time, just listened intently. “Can I talk to you alone for a moment, son?”

Still ‘son.’ Blake could admit to himself how relieved he was to hear that. He glanced at Bane and Barsad, then at Bruce. No way in hell were those three being left alone together. Barsad leaned to kiss his cheek.

“We can go see to the vehicle, if that is your wish.”

The kiss had felt a little awkward. He wasn’t used to having that kind of casual affection on display in front of other people. It was not like they went out that often, or had guests over. He had glanced at him, and then his eyes narrowed when he saw how Barsad’s were twinkling in amusement. The bastard had clearly done it and the draping of his arm over him just to get a rise out of everyone involved; cheeky. The slight grin that flashed on his face had showed that he knew then that Blake knew it, as well. He had slid away quickly before Blake had a chance to push his arm off of him. He had looked over towards Bane.

“I’ll be there in just a minute.” He had tried to send the vibe of, ‘please don’t drag me out of here bodily, that’s not going to help the situation.’ Bane’s eyes had narrowed slightly at Bruce.

“Bruce, we’re done here, right? Schedule says I’ll get a hold of you next Wednesday.”

Thankfully, Bruce did sometimes know how to take a hint. He had looked at Bane then back to Blake. “Wednesday,” he had agreed firmly before he slid his cowl back on. There was hesitation there, a tightening of the shoulders visible even through the armor. Blake had been sure he wanted to going to check on the officers that had been released though. Blake had looked over to Bane gratefully, then glanced back towards Bruce to say goodbye.

Who had vanished. Blake was a little annoyed. He hadn’t exactly mastered the art of disappearing in the middle of a lit room full of people, that was some serious ninja skill. Bane hadn’t looked quite so impressed, but he had walked over to squeeze his arm lightly.

“We will be waiting for you.” It had been said with a glance towards Gordon. “Commissioner,” he had nodded rather politely and left through the front door.

Barsad had lingered a moment, seeming to appraise Gordon before he finally walked out, as well. “I hope you enjoyed the show, commissioner,” he had tossed out over his shoulder before closing the door.

Blake was going to kill him.

He had waited for the door to click shut before he had looked back to Gordon, hesitating. “Is this goodbye, then?”

He hated how his voice sounded when he asked. He was an adult. He had a family. Gordon didn’t have to be a part of that. It didn’t matter how he always felt a little flush of pride warm his stomach whenever he heard him call him ‘son’ even if it was something he probably called all of the other cops he’d known as rookies. It would be better for the man’s conscience to move on. Blake didn’t really need him; he could do his job without him or any police involvement.

“I’d really like for it not to be, Blake, but I’ll understand if that’s what you want.”

He had shaken his head quickly. “No, I don’t want that, I just… I don’t know… I don’t exactly think you’d want to come over for dinner, you know?”

Gordon had stared then laughed a little and startled Blake when he had pulled him close for a firm hug. He hesitated; he was filthy and probably smelled embarrassingly like sex, while Gordon smelled faintly like cologne and a lot like family. He had hugged him back tightly anyway.

“It can’t be any worse than what we ate together during occupation, right?”

“Jesus, how could I forget? Remember the puppy chow?”

“Hey, that made its own gravy.”

Blake had made a slight gagging noise, which was much better than letting the bit of wetness in his eyes grow. His emotions had been kind of a train wreck between everything that had happened that night. He had felt like he was allowed to be just a little off balance. He had pulled back and Gordon had been giving him a small smile.

“I know you don’t think it was the food I was referring to.”

“Oh, those two thugs? You look like you’ve got them in hand.”

“You just trying to check in on me?” he asked cautiously.

“Not just, but yes… Jo—…” He had stopped and put a hand on his shoulder, seeming to be choosing his words carefully. “Robin, is it now?”

He had been unsure over that. He was Blake to the outside world, Robin to Bane and Barsad, what was he to Gordon? Gordon continued, “I’m sorry. I’m not sorry for this, because you’re a good man, and if I thought this had a chance of helping you, well, I’d do it again, but it really doesn’t, does it?” He sounded a little sad and resigned as he said it.

Blake had shaken his head quickly. “It really doesn’t.”

“Then it can’t be helped. I’m sorry I didn’t know sooner, so I could help then, but, son, we don’t just toss aside family because we disagree with them, now do we?”

Blake had let the words wash over him, daring to sneak a look at Gordon. His eyes had been so serious, he knew exactly what he was saying. He’d have known not to use a word like that lightly, not when his family had left him for Cleveland, not when he knew Blake’s history. “No, we don’t, you’re right. You can, uh—” He had cleared his throat. “You’re right, it’s Robin, now.”

Blake had found himself getting hugged again, and he had relaxed into it more. Gordon was family, different family than Bane and Barsad, maybe, but the man had come to mean a lot to him. “We could go out for coffee next week?”

Gordon had given him a pat on the back before letting go. “Coffee sounds good.”

He’d left after that. Barsad had driven while Blake curled up against Bane’s side, quite content to feel his back being stroked and the light vibration of the car lulling him into a nap for the trip home. A comfortable if not a little tired silence was held between them as they reached their home and Blake stumbled out a bit onto the sidewalk. Bane had offered to carry him, but he had had quite enough embarrassment for one night. Besides, he could tell Bane wasn’t at his best, either. So he declined, and they made their way to their nice quiet apartment with a nice hot shower and their wonderful bed. Barsad opened the door for them to enter.

His living room was full of mercenaries. There was no justice in this world.


	22. Chapter 22

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two more after this! Then it is the end. ;)

He stared at half a dozen men sprawled out on his couch, the coffee table was piled high with guns and ammunition in various stages of functioning as they were being efficiently taken apart and cleaned. He took a breath and turned around to face Bane.

“Why?”

Bane wrapped an arm around his waist, clearly sensing his tired frustration. “There are loose ends to tie. Some of your men were required to stay behind for some time.”

“Ok, why are they HERE? Couldn’t they just get a hote—” He stopped when he realized just what a terrible idea that was, secret ninjas in a hotel. That was clearly why they were here, then. It was understandable, but right then he really didn’t want to actually deal with it. He nodded to the men. Christopher, or whatever his name really was, was among them, and they all nodded politely while he gave him a brief smile before they went back to their work. They didn’t seem to actually expect anything from him at the moment, and he could hear the faint sounds of water running from the bathroom attached to their bedroom. He was going to kick Barsad out if he’d dared to jump in before him.

He darted into the bathroom, ready to pull a sopping wet Barsad from the shower, but the man was sitting on the edge of the counter.

“I drew you a bath,” he supplied, seeming entertained by Blake’s assumptions. Blake watched the steam billowing up invitingly from the soapy water in the tub. He didn’t need to be told twice. He tugged his shirt over his shoulders, dropped his pants, and in moments was sloshing down into the hot water. Barsad slid down from the counter to sit beside the tub, slipping his hand into the water to run it across Blake’s submerged knee. Bane entered the bathroom; it was a little crowded between the three of them, but he just grunted and lowered himself down to sit beside to tub, as well. Barsad toed the door shut with his foot. Blake closed his eyes and reached his wet fingers up for Bane’s hand, receiving it and holding it to his cheek, feeling fingers rub against him. They were finally home.

Barsad started to stand. “I should speak to the men.”

Blake grabbed onto his wrist. “They’re grownup ninjas, they can figure stuff out on their own. Chris can be in charge, for now.”

Barsad sat back down, taking hold of his leg as it stretched out of the tub, kissing tenderly over his ankle. “Who?”

“Oh… You know, Christopher, the one you had babysitting me.”

“Assisting you,” Bane corrected lightly. “You led them, in the end, not I.”

“I really did, didn’t I?”

“You did,” Barsad agreed. “And his name is Kojo.”

“Do you think he’d mind if I still called him Chris? He looks more like a Chris, to me.”

Barsad snorted. “I doubt he would mind much. You are free to call any of them what you wish.”

That was probably a little more leeway than he should be given. He smiled at the thought and sank down into the water more.

He let them wash him. The lights were dim and their fingers were soothing as they rubbed soap over every inch of his skin, cleaning away sweat and other fluids. He couldn’t help but be reminded of the early days in the cave, when he was so lost and hurting while Bane washed him clean, how even at the worst time between them his touch was always so shockingly intimate. This was nicer, though; he wished the tub was big enough for all three of them, but it would have been a tight squeeze for even just Barsad to join him, so he was content to sigh and relax as Bane washed his hair while Barsad soaped down his limbs. He was loose and almost asleep again by the time the water was cool.

He didn’t remember how he got out of the tub and into the bed, but suddenly he was there, sinking back down onto it. It had been months and the sheets were fresh, so he couldn’t smell them on it anymore, but they would fix that. He pulled impatiently at Bane to try and get him to lie down with him while Barsad showered, but Bane merely stroked over his drying skin, promising to lie down once he was cleaned up, as well.

He forced himself to stay awake even when Bane stood and Barsad took his place, lying down in front of him and pulling him close, smelling damp and clean.

“You could sleep, he’ll join us soon.”

He shook his head tiredly, sliding his arm around Barsad and pulling him closer, guiding his head so it was tucked against his chest. They were both bare, still, and the slide of warm skin pressed tight to his own made him want more. Barsad nuzzled into him, his hand was resting against his side, fingers clinging lightly to him. “You’re going to fall asleep.” He felt the words murmured softly against his neck.

“Nmph, then keep me up, just for a few minutes. You know he’ll be quick.”

“I suspect you are too tired for how I would like to keep you up.”

“God, how do you even have that much energy?”

He heard a laugh and felt Barsad’s lips press to his throat. “You’re still learning stamina in battle. It pours over into other things, sometimes.”

“Maybe you’re just really horny,” he argued.

“I merely enjoy being able to serve you both, little bird.”

Blake made a soft noise of disbelief then forced his head up to glance at the closed bathroom door. “Was he ok?”

Barsad sighed against him, sliding his leg between Blake’s to intertwine them more. “I did not see him for the first month or so… I imagine it was very difficult. He was without his mask until tonight.”

Blake swore softly under his breath. “How did he…”

“Before we were reunited? I do not know. After, I was able to create something to alleviate symptoms. It was not ideal, but it fulfilled its purpose.”

Blake couldn’t even imagine how Bane had survived that. Barsad had tried to explain to him once, the amount of pain he went through; Bane never spoke of it, and it had boggled Blake’s mind. Then Barsad had politely informed him that he had been speaking about his level of pain with the mask ON. Well, Blake had held onto Bane just a bit tighter that night, and Bane hadn’t seemed to mind.

The bathroom door clicked open and he rolled with a bit of a grunt onto his back to look over. Bane stood in the doorway, the light from the bathroom reflecting on his bare skin before he flicked it off without a word and made his way to the bed, lowering himself onto the bed with a low groan. “You should be sleeping.”

“We were waiting for you.” Barsad reached over Blake and patted his arm.

Bane’s eyes crinkled slightly into a tired, amused smile as he reached to run his fingers over Barsad’s wrist. “And I have arrived.”

Blake thought about what Barsad had told him, about Bane’s long, pain-filled days spent alone while he had been locked away, unable to rescue either of them, how Bane must have suffered. Suddenly, he felt more than a little selfish about wanting to be wrapped up between the two of them. He pushed himself up and Bane watched him curiously as he climbed up onto him, lowering himself onto his body, pillowing his head on his chest. Barsad smiled at him, seeming to understand, and moved closer, sidling up tight to Bane’s side, his leg sliding up to slip between Blake’s and Bane’s so their legs were all a tangle, his hand coming up to drape over them both. Anyone else would probably feel smothered. Bane simply made an amused noise and wrapped an arm around them, settling in to sleep.

Blake should have slept through the night, they all should have, but apparently Blake’s body had other plans. He woke from the middle of a hazy slumber, some sort of strange, nonsense dreams within dreams still fuzzy in his brain; dreams where Bane’s lips were whole and healed and thick, rubbing against him everywhere, but he was wearing the most ridiculous outfit. Blake was just starting to come back to reality as he was grinding against the dream Bane’s pants, working on tearing his awful shirt off of him and that’s how he woke, fingers digging into Bane’s solid biceps, feeling himself growing hard and pressed against his thigh.

He let out a soft moan, rolling his hips into the thick muscle. He couldn’t help but think about just how good Bane would feel inside, his offer from earlier that evening. He found he also couldn’t help but squirm against the warm skin under him more, sighing out at the contact, a bit a precome spurting out from him embarrassingly quickly against Bane’s skin, slicking the way. He came to his senses and finally stilled himself, realizing he was about to rub one out against Bane’s leg like a horny teenager.

He felt Bane’s hand slide into his hair, fingers curling into his locks. “Why did you stop?” His voice sounded sleepy, which was rare and charming. Usually he sounded wide awake the moment his eyes opened.

“Consent issues,” he mumbled back, his own voice lower from sleep as well. “And I’m not sixteen.”

He could feel Bane rumbling under him in amusement, and couldn’t hold back his own grin.

“You know you always have my consent, my little bird.”

He hummed softly at that and kissed a trail across his collarbone.

_______________


	23. Chapter 23

_______________

  
Their little Robin had woken him with his sleepy actions and the soft moan that he had breathed out while barely yet awake. He could feel their Robin’s length stiff against his leg, and the bit of wetness that had bubbled out from him there. Truth be told, he had not been in a deep sleep, though it had been a relaxing one. Their bodies radiated a pleasant heat into him, and the weight of them pressing down on and against him was anything but suffocating. Now he was more than content to feel soft lips rubbing over his chest, sucking wet little kisses into the skin.

He was mumbling something against his skin, soft enough that it took Bane a moment to interpret it above the constant soft hiss of his mask.

“You’re ok, right? You’re really ok? Yeah, you’re ok, I’ve got you, now…” He was rubbing the heel of his palm firmly against the taut skin of his stomach.

His little one was trying to comfort him, and perhaps himself in the process. It was touching.

Bane cradled the back of his neck, squeezing gently but not pulling him up so their eyes met, not quite willing to give up the feeling of that warm mouth against him. “Of course, you have me, now,” he assured.

Barsad had obviously been speaking to their Robin about the trials of the prison in the short time they had been alone. Bane was displeased at the thought, but accepted that if their Robin wished to know then it was his right, so he could not fault Barsad in telling him. He could, however, reach over and give his brother’s arm a rougher squeeze if he was going to insist on still being asleep while their little one was feeling amorous. He felt the body pressed to his side stiffen in response, taking a quick assessment of danger as he took in his surroundings before he even opened his eyes, then loosened back into a relaxed state.

“What am I missing?”

Bane was not quite sure what to tell him. Their Robin was still at his chest, he moaned lightly when his nipple was caught up between wet lips and sucked on briefly before a kiss was placed there. Finally, he responded with, “Our little one appears to need us.”

He felt a hot snort push out over his chest. “Bane.” He crawled up his body, sinking his elbows into the bed above his shoulders. He felt him lean in and push his lips to the grate of the mask, blowing a hot breath of air into it. Bane parted his own lips, feeling the recycled air wash over them.

“It’s not just about what I need all of the time. It’s really not.”

He dug his thumb lightly into the muscles at the back of their little one’s neck as he considered that. It should be. It should always be about keeping him protected and given what he needed. However, there was a certain conundrum here that Bane recognized. If their Robin needed for their relationship to not just be about him, then making it so would be fulfilling his needs, even if that need meant he wasn’t the center of the relationship.

“What is it you wish, exactly?” he finally asked.

“I just… I want to take care of you right now, ok? Can I try and make you feel good?” The words came out in a rush, and he could feel the weight and need in them as the air from them brushed over his lips again.

“Do you wish to be inside of me?” He felt the little shiver that ran down their Robin’s muscles at his question.

“Yeah...” The word was long and drawn out, full of desire. “But I want you to want it, too, not just ‘cause I do.”

Barsad reached to touch his fingers to their Robin’s cheek. “He gets sentimental when left alone.”

“So?” It came out as slightly defensive, but then he turned his head towards Barsad. “You can’t tell me you haven’t thought of it, too. He always does the work... I just want him to be able to lie back and enjoy it, for once.”

“You want him to be the one undone, for once.” Barsad was smiling in understanding; his eyes had a secretive glint to them. Bane knew he was thinking of their time in the cell. When the absence of his vaporized drugs had caused everything to feel stronger, sharper, and he had spilled into his disciple’s warm hand in moments. “Perhaps together we might accomplish it.”

The smile on his brother’s lips warped into something slightly more mischievous and Bane could not help but feel curious when it was soon reflected on their Robin’s face.  “Very well. If it is your wish for me to… relax, then I shall do so,” he finally acquiesced, giving their Robin a final touch to his cheek before he brought his arms up and folded them so his hands were behind his head, letting himself relax as they both seemed to wish of him. He could indulge such curious whims if they both were going to be so insistent of it.

_______________

  
Barsad pushed himself up a bit to half lean onto Bane with their Robin, both of them sprawled out on top of him, really. It was a tight fit even with the broad expanse that was his brother’s chest, and he wiggled close so his hip was tight to their Robin, their Robin who was flushed already with arousal from his cheeks down to his throat. Barsad was certain he was quite hard. There would have to be patience, though, if he really wanted to do this as he said, and Barsad wanted to be able to help him.

He pressed his lips to their Robin’s ear and whispered, “Calm yourself, little one. Let us work him up to where you are first, hmm?”

Barsad listened to him take a deep breath beside him, releasing it slowly as he nodded and looked a small measure calmer than he had before. Barsad sighed happily and lowered his head down to nuzzle at Bane’s shoulder. It was rare that he touched his brother beyond his cock and a few fleeting presses with his hands. He was not about to take for granted such an occasion.

Blake dipped his head back down to join him, and together they kissed from each shoulder down to join in the middle at the low dip between his brother’s thick pectorals. He watched as their Robin’s cheeks hollowed slightly as he sucked there, pulling back with a soft wet noise which sent a shot of arousal straight to his own cock. He could hear Bane’s breathing starting to grow heavy, and Barsad could not resist catching their Robin’s lips up for a kiss. They moaned together, their tongues meeting briefly before they went back to work. Barsad followed their Robin’s lead, mirrored his motions on his side of Bane’s body.  

Together, they grew more aggressive in their game. Their teeth scraped against Bane’s skin, their fingers scratched across his arms, down his sides, they pressed fingertips and palms roughly into tight muscles, enough to force them into relaxation. Under them, Barsad could sense his brother wrestling for self-control; it was a beautiful thing, how his skin was beginning to break into a light sweat, the bite marks that were mottled over his chest and abdomen now.

He traced his tongue over a line of scarring that ran from just along his brother’s shoulder and tucked into the curve of the pit of his arm. He felt the ever so slight jump of muscles and bit back a soft laugh; even his brother was not immune to being ticklish. He glanced up and was fixed with a half-hearted look of disapproval from Bane.  He’d just have to mention it to their Robin later, when they were alone.

But now their Robin had broken away from their game and was sliding down lower. All of his training had added a certain grace to his movements that made the act sensual. He went down to Bane’s thighs and slid his hands between them.

“Come on…” his voice was soft and alluring.

Barsad knew his brother would have obeyed either way, but there was a more relaxed movement to his motions now as he parted his thighs and their Robin settled to kneel down in the space left for him, as though their attentions on him had drawn him into a more tranquil state, perhaps. It was a curious thing. It was also lovely, though. Barsad slid from his brother’s body to kneel beside him, keeping his splayed fingers flat on his stomach as he watched.  Their Robin’s back was bent into a tempting curve as he leaned over. His hair had grown longer in their absence, and now the loose curls that it liked to dry into when it went uncombed were brushed across his forehead as he rubbed his lips over the foreskin of Bane’s cock.

Bane’s hips twitched; a bead of precome was pearling at his slit, and their little Robin worked to gather it up with his tongue. Barsad reached out and let his thumb and fingers curl in a loose fist around the base of his brother’s cock, contracting his fingers in soft teasing pulses around him as their Robin worked further with his mouth, drawing back the foreskin, playing with it lightly before he suckled gently at the exposed glans. Underneath their teasing mouths and fingers Bane was groaning, his eyes had closed now and his hands had gathered up fistfuls of their bedding. He was working to keep himself still, to not thrust up into their Robin’s mouth.

Barsad listened to the cut off little noise in their Robin’s throat as he slid Bane further into his mouth and worked to suck at him as best he could. Barsad rubbed slowly still; he could feel saliva and Bane’s fluid’s beginning to trickle down from the loose seal of their Robin’s lips and coat his fingers. He smoothed the slippery blend onto Bane’s cock and stroked him faster, reaching with his free hand to cup him lower, feeling his sack draw up closer to his body in anticipation of orgasm. His body, which had been relaxed, was now tensing again. Barsad looked to Blake’s eyes and saw the mischief in them even through his lowered lashes. He understood his intent and was entertained at the notion.  They continued for a few moments longer, Blake humming softly in contentment, the vibrations driving Bane on further until he let out a growl that, through the mask, sounded akin to a low purr. When it was clear he was about to spill over, Barsad tightened his thumb and finger around his base in a tight grip to stave off his orgasm, and their Robin pulled back with a lurid slurp, licking his swollen lips. Their brother’s breath caught and he seemed downright disoriented for a few long moments as his body struggled to cope with the loss of pleasure.

“Not until I’m inside of you,” Blake explained, seeming almost apologetic in a way that made it clear he wasn’t at all. “You taste good, though.” He flicked his tongue out again, smiling when Bane’s hips jerked up as he tried to chase the fleeting feeling of his tongue on his cock. “I never thought I’d get used to that taste, you know? I never thought I’d miss it.”

“Little one…” The words were sighed out, not in frustration, but in a soft hiss that told Barsad that his brother was enjoying their Robin’s play. “I would like very much for you to take me, now.” His words were spoken with blunt honesty as usual.

“I seem to remember telling you the same thing in so many words an awful lot and you made me wait a whole lot longer.”

Bane chuckled, not at all perturbed. “So I have. I suppose this is my punishment? To be teased until I writhe for you?”

Their Robin seemed to have been waiting for the question because he proudly shot back, “Oh no, I do not punish. I simply offer correction.”

“Ahh.” Bane made an amused noise “I see.”

Their Robin looked rather pleased with himself as he waited a moment for Bane to settle and then ducked back down to tease him again with his mouth. Between them, they worked him up again until his brother’s hips were twitching and he was at his edge. Their Robin cruelly drew back again, and Barsad tightened his grip once more to hold him back. Bane’s breath was coming out in short huffs, his body was tight again, but he offered no complaint.

The third time, he offered a frustrated growl.

The fourth, a grunt and his hips jerked up sharply.

Their Robin’s lips curled up into a little grin at the noise. Barsad could not resist sharing in it.

“Our brother has a secret, little bird.”

“Oh?” He found their Robin’s attention turned to him.

“Oh yes. You see, I have discovered that the mask in fact covers many of the more… delicate noises one might hear from him if it were not blocking them.”

Their Robin made an inquisitive noise at that. “You heard them? Do they sound good?”

“Lovely,” he confirmed. “In fact, you can deduce from the rise and fall of his chest that they are likely coming from him as we speak.” He could not resist letting his thumb flutter across the thick vein along the underside of his brother’s cock, and with it came the minute dip of his brother’s belly in response. Their Robin followed his eyes and they seemed to glow with curiosity at this newfound knowledge.

“I wonder…” He nimbly crawled his way back up their brother’s body, until their chests were flush together, the sweat between them made him slip further until he was pressing his ear tight to the grate of their brother’s mask, listening attentively. Bane’s arousal wound up slipping between their Robin’s lithe thighs, smearing a sticky trail of fluids against them.

“Come on, I want to hear,” he encouraged, brushing his hand across Bane’s scalp.

“I am not certain I can produce them on command,” came Bane’s muted response, even then he sounded slightly regretful, to not be able to produce them for their Robin’s whim.

“I guess I have to help, then,” their Robin replied, and Barsad smiled at the confidence in his tone. He’d heard it more often directed at him, before their Robin would slide into him and made a mess of both of their bodies. Now, Barsad withdrew his hand from his brother’s length as their Robin’s thighs tightened around it. His brother’s body shuddered slightly at the sudden pleasure and their Robin stilled above him, his eyes lidded as he listened with rapt attention.

“Oh fuck, I can hear it; you sound so good…” His voice sounded awed and encouraging as he rubbed his fingers in little circles at Bane’s temple.  “Move your hips for me?”

Bane brought his hands up and dug his fingers into their Robin’s ass as he shifted his own hips up, rutting against the smooth skin of their Robin’s inner thighs. Barsad could hear only heavy breathing from his place, but from the smile on their Robin’s face, and the deepening arousal in his hungry eyes, he could tell he was listening to a personal symphony.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Final chapter tomorrow. :)


	24. Chapter 24

_______________

  
It was so hard to hear over the hiss of the mask, harder still as chemicals tickled distractingly over his ear, making it cool and numbing it. He didn’t care about that, though, he knew what he was listening for and he could make it out faintly; soft groans that did not come out as growls, breathless noises that were almost soundless in their quietness, but still full of want. Once, he swore he could hear the wet, barely audible pop of Bane’s mouth falling open, followed by a wanton sigh.

It was breathtaking. Bane didn’t sound like him or Barsad. He didn’t get the same needful quality to his tone that Blake begrudgingly admitted his noises took on when they touched him, nor did he have quite the same quality of sensual abandon that Barsad’s took on no matter what he was giving or receiving. Instead, he sounded like a prowling animal who had decided to roll over and show his belly, not because he was doing it as an act of submissive desire, but simply because it pleased Blake and therefore pleased him, as well. It was humbling, then, and empowering to listen to those noises, to feel Bane’s hot length rub slippery between his legs, soaking them. The power play between the three of them was always a bit like riding the edge of a knife, a dangerous thrill that Blake couldn’t resist letting himself be drawn into.

He ordered, they obeyed, but they were stronger; even as his own prowess grew, he felt like he would never truly be able to beat them, not with Bane’s strength and power, not with Barsad’s cunning and skill. It was as though Blake had been put in charge of a pair of dangerous tigers, who offered their throats to be leashed, who followed his lead, and Blake led, but with the knowledge tucked away deep down that they could pounce him whenever they wished and he would be able to do nothing. It was entirely their fault. They had warped him into the kind of crazy man who teased at tigers, who pulled their tails and let them taste his skin. Good thing they seemed to just enjoy the teasing, but his own cock couldn’t take much more of it.

“God, god, you sound amazing. I want you.” He pulled back from the mask reluctantly, rubbing the chill out of his ear.

“Then you shall have me.” Bane placed his palm to his ear and Blake leaned into it, greedily accepting the heat. “Do you wish me wet for it?”

Blake blinked, because who the hell would want to be dry for it, when he remembered some of the stories he’d been told about his ‘sister.’ Sometimes he forgot how rough things got with those three.

“Yeah, always,” he replied firmly, flicking his eyes over to Barsad, as well. “I don’t like the idea of either of you guys ever getting hurt from it. Well, REALLY hurting,” he amended when his brain was more than happy to supply him with a few memories of Barsad on his knees while Bane fucked him until he screamed. Sometimes a little pain was more than ok. “I’ll do it.”

Barsad leaned over them to their bedside table. Blake didn’t need to know how there was a fresh bottle of lubricant there; maybe he owed a ninja or two an awkward thank you card. He took it and poured out a palmful. He didn’t really want to admit just how much he’d gotten used to the action over the past few months, though at least he’d be putting his newfound skills to use on someone else. He swirled his fingers through the liquid as it warmed in his palm. Bane drew his knees up, granting him better access. Blake took a moment before he rubbed his wetted fingers across Bane’s hole, watching his reaction curiously.

Before, he had been too shocked to think about it, but now he could watch as he carefully pressed a finger into him and felt the tightness there squeeze around him. Barsad was pliant and clung to him when he was inside, drawing his orgasm from him. Bane was a vice, one that clamped down and did not let go until it got what it wanted or broke something trying. Blake just prayed it wasn’t his fingers or his cock as he worked Bane open. He was so tight still even when he added another finger and twisted them around carefully. Bane pushed back to meet them, and Blake hoped he liked it, really liked it, not just liked it because Blake liked it. It was hard to tell, so he figured he’d just have to work really hard to be sure he did. He skimmed his fingertips across the rim of him, letting them tickle over the sensitive nerve endings there, watching as it loosened up and became shiny with slick, ready for him. Bane was breathing heavily now and he brought his hand to Blake’s shoulder.

“I am quite ready.”

Blake supposed that was as close as he was going to get to a ‘please take me,’ and he couldn’t help but feel proud over it. “I’m not, just yet.” He rubbed against his thigh, entertained over the thought of being the one to soothe Bane instead of the usual reversal. “I’m waiting for Barsad to get me ready.”

Barsad blinked then chuckled and grabbed up the bottle. “Of course, my apologies.”

Blake rose up onto his knees a bit more, spreading his legs and giving Barsad better access. The first slick finger that worked into him made him wince slightly. He was still worked open a bit from their brutal fucking not all that many hours ago, but he was sore from it, too. He felt Barsad press a kiss to the back of his shoulder in apology.

“If you are too sore—”

“I’m good, I promise,” he cut him off. “If you don’t—” It was his turn to be cut off by a hiss when Barsad rubbed firmly into a particularly sore spot. “Just take it slow.”

“I will, but I doubt it is me you have to worry about as much as it is your own eagerness.”

Barsad’s cockiness was always more infuriating when he was completely right. His fingers, however, did slow, and he paused often to rewet them, until Blake couldn’t help but roll his hips back at them, closing his eyes and letting out a soft ‘ah’ when they were thrust deeper. Barsad’s fingers were longer, more slender, and he used them quite well, pressing, rubbing, and twisting until Blake was moving faster and let out an irritated grunt when they were pulled from him.

Then he gasped when Barsad’s wet hand wrapped around his cock and gave a skilled twist, flicking his thumb along the head.

“I thought you wanted to spill inside of him, not on the sheets.”

Blake looked down at Bane, who had obviously just been watching his little display, clearly entertained by it. Right. He was trying NOT to get too worked up first. He could do this, make Bane feel good and not snap into the desperate little thing he’d turned into the first time Bane had taken him inside, and he could do it with Barsad in him, too. He’d grown since then, after all, and had had some pretty mind-blowing sex already. He was totally up for this.

Barsad kneeled behind him, kissing at the damp hair curling slightly at the base of his neck before he began to push into him. Blake sighed as he was stretched open; he had missed Barsad being inside of him, how he sounded overcome whenever he bottomed out inside of Blake, his hips grinding against him roughly to work in as deeply as possible. Blake appreciated the thoroughness as well as the soft graze of teeth across the curve of his neck. Bane gave him a minute to adjust, literally one minute, Blake suspected, before he spoke.

“I think he requires assistance, brother.”

“Hey, no, he’s on my si—” He cried out as he was pushed forward slightly, and Barsad had the audacity to place a kiss on his neck and whisper a soft assurance to him.

“Of course I am on your side, little bird, but I also know what will bring you the most pleasure.”

Then he took hold of Blake’s cock and lined him up with Bane’s opening, a firm push of Barsad’s hips meant that Blake’s cock began to breach Bane’s opening, his cockhead forcing past the tight ring of muscles, making him feel like he was choking on his own moans. He hadn’t been ready, and that just wasn’t fair at all. He couldn’t do much beyond squirm as Barsad continued to push him forward, he could only watch as Bane’s body slowly took him in. He felt so amazingly tight around him, if he had been any less wet with slick it would have bordered on painful. As it was, Blake’s stomach jumped up into his throat in pure horror when he was close enough that Bane could reach his sides and his hands curled around them. He yelped when he was yanked forward, the rest of him being forced into Bane without time for him to adjust to the idea, their skin smacking together.

“Oh fuck, FUCK!” he swore and twisted between them. He felt like his brain was melting. He couldn’t move; if he moved, he was going to absolutely break down.

Bane let out a pleasured noise under him that sent a sharp pang of desire right to Blake’s cock, and every animal instinct was telling him to just stop trying to think and just FUCK already.

“You feel very lovely, my little bird.” Bane’s voice was thick with desire, sounding raspy even through the mask. It wasn’t helping.

“Shut up, shut up,” he gasped out desperately. If everyone could just not move and not talk, he could get his bearings and they could have sex like civilized adults. He wanted to make Bane come undone under him, and that was becoming the most laughable idea he’d ever had. Any thoughts earlier on teasing him, edging him, the noises he’d made for him, oh, none of it had been an act, but it had all been done for Blake and Blake had worked hard to do it, however it was humiliating now for Bane to show him just how easy it was to absolutely wreck him in return.

Bane squeezed around him and Blake let out a ragged gasp. “Oh shit, fuck, don’t, just don’t, just let me, I can do it!”

He really couldn’t. It was more than just being inside Bane. It was all of the knowledge that came with it, of what he was being given. They had fucked once, already in their reuniting, but that wasn’t just them, that was a show, not something as intimate between them and here Bane was giving himself to him and Barsad was behind him, rubbing his stomach, soothing him as best he could, only it wasn’t soothing at all because he was so hot in him, too, and he could feel his cock twitching inside of his ass and it was all just working him up even more; he was absolutely coming apart at the seams for them, and he hadn’t even gotten one thrust in.

He tried to speak again about just how unfair it all was, but Bane placed his hand to his mouth, rubbing his thumb over his lips.

“You have nothing to prove, little one, let go. Enjoy yourself.”

So he did.

Well, first he had whimpered and held out for about two more seconds, then he let out a broken, defeated noise that would absolutely never be spoken about, and THEN he let go. In the end, he didn’t care how desperate he sounded, how he probably was moving with the finesse of an animal in heat. They felt so good, and he loved the feeling of being sandwiched between them; he wasn’t even sure when that had happened, but there he was, Barsad’s weight draped over his back, trailing his tongue along the shell of his ear and whispering the most awful things into it, his own face pressed tight to Bane’s chest as he tried to at least smother SOME of the obscene noises coming out of his mouth, as he thrust between them frantically, his body unable to decide if it would rather rock back onto Barsad’s cock or forward into Bane’s tightness. He was just grateful when they took the choice from him.

Bane’s hand ruffled through his hair, as though he found the absolute mess they had made him into to be adorable. “Only concern yourself with moving forward; Barsad will see to the rest.”

He whimpered again at how unfair this all was, how Bane was so composed sounding, but he listened and that made it a little easier. Bane was right; Barsad thrust into him so perfectly, each stroke rubbing him just the right way, any soreness from earlier long since gone. He was able to steady his own rhythm then, make it into something that he hoped made Bane feel good. He could feel him pressed between them, so hot, and he just knew he was going to be the first one to come, as usual, but he wanted them to go with him.

“S’ not fair,” he practically slurred out his protest. “Wanted to make you feel good, so good.”

He could hear Bane’s chuckle under him, feel how he rubbed his fingers into his scalp. “Little bird, you bring us so much pleasure.” It was said with so much honesty that Blake felt himself relax finally, and just left well enough alone. He made them feel good, they made him feel good, who really cared about anything else?

His orgasm was winding up tight in him now. He knew it couldn’t possibly be more than a moment or so away, and the signs must have been obvious. He could feel Barsad thrusting faster into him, his own moans being let out against Blake’s neck. Bane’s hips rose to meet his thrusts, the weight of two bodies not enough to deter his movements.

“You are doing well, my little bird; you are so close, spill yourself into me,” Bane ordered firmly, and how could Blake ever disobey that? The urge to climax rushed through him, forcing him to drive into Bane roughly until he cried out and arched his spine then possibly fucking mewled as he felt himself shooting out, pumping into Bane as per his request, practically having come on command for him. But it was ok, because even while he was breaking apart for them, he could faintly hear their noises joining his own, only moments apart, and then he could feel the hot spill of seed against his belly coupled with the heat of it pouring inside of him.  He’d managed to make them come with him, and that was really all he had wanted, to make them both feel as good as they always made him feel.

Well, that and he wanted to never move again. Ever. Good thing they all seemed to have to same idea. Barsad settled on top of him, spooning against his back, his now soft member still tucked away inside of him, which was fair because he hadn’t exactly mustered the energy to pull out of Bane. He was still working on getting his breathing steady again and their hands were rubbing across his arms and back.

“Are you sore? I can move, if you wish,” Barsad offered.

“Don’t you dare,” Blake warned, letting his eyes slip shut.

“Or what?” Barsad couldn’t seem to resist asking, placing a kiss to Blake’s cheek.

“Hmph, I don’t know. There’s a room full of muscled ninjas out there, someone’s bound to take your place.”

“I would slit their throat,” Barsad interjected cheerfully, rubbing his thumb against Blake’s throat in mimicry of his promise. “Besides, none are as handsome as I am.”

"I don't know, Chris is out there, and he is pretty smoking hot," he teased, purely to get a rise out of them.  
  
"He is very good with his mouth," Barsad agreed. "I think you would enjoy it."

Well, shit. He jerked a little under him at that, and suddenly he was the one feeling a bit of the green monster creeping up his spine. He couldn’t see Barsad, but he reached out to squeeze his hand and, in that moment, tiredness be damned, he wanted to pin him down onto the bed and make him forget he'd ever felt stupid Chris's mouth by replacing the memories with his own wrapped around his cock.

He wasn’t sure when he’d become that possessive, really. He hadn’t even been aware he was the jealous type. Barsad made a curious noise behind him and pressed a kiss to his ear.

“We are comrades, little Robin, it is not unusual for such things to happen.”

“Does it… still happen?” He wasn’t gritting his teeth as he asked, really.

Bane chuckled under him and cupped his cheek. “Your eyes have turned green, I believe. Barsad is yours, is he not? He has no need for another unless you wished it.”

“Never would I touch another unless it was your desire,” Barsad agreed and Blake felt himself relax again. “Though your jealousy is endearing.”

“You’re mine,” He pointed out firmly, just for good measure, before he let his hand go.

“Yours,” Barsad agreed happily and then finally withdrew and cleaned up, but somehow ended up back in the same squished position which no one really questioned or complained about. They just slept.

When he woke up sometime early the next evening, it wasn’t some storybook ending because, well, he was piled on a bed with two mercenaries and his ass was sore. Not to mention there were ninjas in his living room, and he realized he’d forgotten to brush his teeth so his mouth felt kind of fuzzy, but he could smell coffee which meant there were also maybe ninjas in the kitchen making him coffee, and Barsad’s beard was tickling his cheek while Bane’s arm was wrapped tightly around his waist, and fuck if it didn’t all seem pretty perfect.

Coffee could wait. He let himself drift back off for a little longer with a sleepy smile. Two days to be lazy in bed, he decided. Two days to soak up all of their attention. Then he was going to deal with the world, the ninjas, getting back out on the streets and showing the criminals that he hadn’t forgotten about them. Two more days, because in more two days it was a Wednesday, and if he was being made to get up out of this bed for Bruce, then he was going to take the time to put his world back together while he was at it.

Then he was totally going to webcam himself blowing both of his boyfriends to Bruce, just because.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The end guys! I hope you all enjoyed this verse as much as I did! Thank you so much for reading and all of your kudos and kind comments! This is definitely a verse I can see myself writing in again so who knows what we'll see in it! For now I have another story written. It is an inception/TDKR crossover featuring these lovely three once again (Bane/Blake/Barsad). I will begin posting it once GF has completed proofreading it! :)
> 
> And because I am a shameless self promoter I am including a link to my tumblr account, an account of nonsense feels, and fic updates.
> 
> http://www.tumblr.com/blog/relevantlyirreverent


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